On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 5:24 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <phil...@opera.com> wrote: >> I do think that in the basic case of a user pressing play on a video >> player, it's good to be able to make that respond instantly rather >> than waiting for a round-trip to begin playing. > > Have you found this to be an actual problem in Firefox, which does suspend > download after reaching HAVE_METADATA?
It's not a big problem, but a user experience one: user interfaces are cleaner when they're immediately responsive. I'd sooner give a crisp interface to users than one that feels delayed. >> Another use case is the background of a game, where you want the video >> ready to start when gameplay begins. > > For that you should really use <audio preload=auto>, no? Not if all you want is for the video to start with the rest of the game, and not to download the whole video. They're both minor, of course; helpful side-effects of preload=buffer, not sufficient justifications by themselves. Hmm. To get this effect without preload=buffer, you could set preload=auto, watch the buffered attribute to see when some data is actually downloaded, then set it to preload=metadata to stop autoloading. That's a minor hack, and would need to watch out for browsers that don't autoload on preload=auto, but it's probably good enough for the above cases. It'd only work if runtime changes to preload are applied, which would also be needed for scripts to implement "preload=auto only when paused". -- Glenn Maynard
