Re: Fulscreen Tag Proposal

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 11:45 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com>wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:22:44 +0200, Paul Ellis <paul@ellisfoundation.com>
> wrote:
>
>  On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 3:49 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com
>> >wrote:
>>
>>  On Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:20:37 +0200, Paul Ellis <paul@ellisfoundation.com
>>> >
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>  Any solution that requires creating another window and opening a new
>>>
>>>> document would create a lot of issues that would not compare favorably
>>>> with
>>>> any current popular web video plugin (Flash, Silverlight, etc). It would
>>>> not
>>>> be a very seemless transition. The <video> resource from the parent page
>>>> may
>>>> have downloaded hundreds of MB of data and then the new window would
>>>> make
>>>> a
>>>> new separate request for the same resource. Certainly the browsers could
>>>> try
>>>> to aggressively cache video content for these situations but even that
>>>> wouldn't work in all cases (any HTTP connection that doesn't allow byte
>>>> range requests, e.g. HTTP 1.0), and it probably would not work very well
>>>> for
>>>> resource constrained devices such as smartphones and tablets. This type
>>>> of
>>>> hand-off would have to happen every time the user switched between
>>>> fullscreen and embedded mode as well.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Browsers can and do cache resources that don't support byte ranges. About
>>> the topic at hand, I think the experience we want is to click a button or
>>> select "fullscreen" in the context menu, causing an element to go to
>>> fullscreen, still with the possibility of rendering some content on top
>>> of
>>> it, for custom controls and the like.
>>>
>>>
>> I suppose I wasn't clear in what I meant. Clearly browsers can cache
>> resources that don't support byte ranges. I was pointing out that if a new
>> connection is made for a resource that has previously only been partially
>> downloaded/cached, then the browser would not be able to resume the
>> download. It must start downloading the resource from the beginning.
>>
>
> This also isn't the case, we can and do cache just part of the resource and
> reuse that as long as it stays in the cache. I don't know what other
> browsers do.


You could still use the cached portion, but to get beyond the partially
cached portion the browser will have to re-download all of the data that has
already been cached. So if a video has previously been 50% downloaded/cached
and a new request is made for that video to resume playback at 50% of the
way into the video then the the only way the video can resume playback is to
start a download from the beginning of the file.

I know that it would seem like an edge case that sites would want to stream
video using HTTP 1.0 or with range requests disabled but it has been my
experience working on the DivX Web Player that it is much more common than
you would expect. The direction being proposed in the Mozilla wiki for
fullscreen would work fine in this scenario. My comments were directed at
the original post in this thread.

Paul Ellis