- From: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 14:26:26 +1100
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com>, "Edward O'Connor" <hober0@gmail.com>, Jeremy Keith <jeremy@adactio.com>, HTMLwg <public-html@w3.org>
On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 1:46 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote: > > On Dec 31, 2009, at 3:15 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote: > >> >> I believe so. Every web page that has more than maybe 3 videos >> "embedded" - and that is video search results pages, video archive >> listings and similar things - will need to stop their videos from >> taking up unwanted bandwidth. This is a really common use - and also >> one that John Gruber's blog post mentioned. > > How much network traffic does it take to grab enough of the video to get > dimensions, duration, and possibly the first frame (if there's no separate > poster frame)? If it's similar to or less than the cost of loading an image, > than doing it 3 or even 50 times for a single page load does not seem so > bad. After all, you need to load that number of images anyway to show any > form of thumbnail whatsoever It's probably on a similar scale to loading images - maybe a little more. Since the poster frame will always be loaded, it would roughly double or triple the amount of data loaded on a busy video page. I guess for a normal desktop browser, it shouldn't be so bad. It'd be more of an issue for mobile browsers - but they may decide to never autobuffer anyway. I guess it brings another dimension into buffering, that could be relevant to be expressed by the page author: * the page author could have four choices - don't care, buffer nothing, buffer bare essentials, buffer full resource. * the browser has three choices to react to these suggestions - buffer nothing, buffer bare essentials, buffer full resource (the decision being influenced by the suggestion of the page author and other information it has available at the time). * further, the user could have four choices (to be expressed in browser preferences) - let browser decide, never autobuffer anything, always autobuffer bare essentials, always autobuffer full resource. [And if we wanted to bring in accessibility here, it could even be: autobuffer only video track or autobuffer only audio track - but that is taking it a bit too far at the moment, since these require splitting the resource into tracks which is generally not a simple undertaking.] OTOH, we could wait with this feature for a future HTML6 or something, when we will have more experience with how often Web authors had to create javascript to avoid the pre-buffering activity of the browsers. I obviously don't currently have any stats to support the need for expressing "don't buffering anything". Regards, Silvia.
Received on Sunday, 3 January 2010 03:27:18 UTC