Re: Public feedback on HTML5 video

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 4:17 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer
> <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 3. @autobuffer="off" - the web page author cares and believes it would
>> be a nuisance to the user to autobuffer this video and waste
>> bandwidth, so the browser doesn't autobuffer - it this case, it may
>> even make sense to not even try and initialise the decoding pipeline,
>> but only display the poster frame, if possible (maybe the
>> X-Content-Duration can help to display the video duration and that's
>> all that's required?). I'm specifically thinking here about a Web page
>> that has dozens of videos on it (e.g. as search results or for
>> browsing a collection). It might not make sense to pre-buffer anything
>> at all in such a case where playback is highly unlikely.
>
> This comes back around to what Philip was saying before - is it really
> best for the user to treat autobuffer=off any different than no
> autobuffer at all?  *Will* a browser treat the two differently?  We
> know that it's obviously often best to not autobuffer by default -
> this has been established, and the automatic autobuffering that is
> going on currently in some browsers is a bug.  Once that is fixed,
> though, is it really worthwhile to do something fully different in
> your situation 1 and 3?

My suggestion above actually makes a distinction between what browser
vendors could do between 1 and 3: since 3 has more information for the
browser vendor, namely that the video is probably not going to be
played, 3 could mean not to even bother initialising the video
element. Whereas 1 means the browser vendor doesn't know and therefore
it could at least initialise it.


> I think I'd like to see video durations and such for all videos, even
> if they're not autobuffered.  If you *really* don't want *anything*
> video-related to download, the best thing to do is simply not put a
> video in the page.  Just use a thumbnail with a link to the video,
> possible with js to replace the thumbnail with a <video> element for
> quicker turnaround (this has already been explored in this thread).

Yes, a js workaround is possible. But when a feature can be added in
such a simple way rather than having to do a js workaround, why not do
it? Isn't HTML5 about avoiding many of the js workarounds that ppl had
to deal with in HTML4? Are we just going to force ppl to make
workarounds for such simple things for the new HTML5 elements again?


Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Thursday, 31 December 2009 09:44:53 UTC