[Bug 11984] <video>: Figure out the story with respect to honouring Content-Type headers vs sniffing content

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11984

--- Comment #50 from Adrian Bateman [MSFT] <adrianba@microsoft.com> ---
(In reply to Ian 'Hixie' Hickson from comment #49)
> We should definitely sniff the same way, if we sniff.
> 
> If you can interpret the type, why couldn't you interpret the first few
> bytes? They're only a few bytes later on the same stream.

Why? What are the consequences to not sniffing the same way? As far as I can
tell, one outcome would be that legitimate content might not be detected as
legitimate in some browsers if they don't sniff the same way. That's a quality
of implementation problem for the browsers that chose not to play playable
content. Another is that a browser thinks content is a specific content type
but isn't and fails in some way. Again another quality of implementation
problem.

IE doesn't do the media processing - we rely on Windows' media engine to do
that. We can tell it to be strict (in which case it checks the content type and
only tries to play with a decoder pipeline matching the type) or we can tell it
to be lax (in which case it will iterate through the allowed decoder list and
just try to play each one). We don't get an opportunity to pull out data from
the stream and then push it back. Of course, we could talk to the Windows team
that owns this code and ask for a change but if I am right about the
consequences above then I'm not sure it is worth the additional investment.

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Received on Tuesday, 14 January 2014 15:51:00 UTC