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Support for slow links?
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jltu...@gmail.com
Aug 1, 2014, 8:37:04 PM8/1/14
to mozilla-d...@lists.mozilla.org
Many folks outside of cities do not have access to high-speed internet. As more and more websites incorporate video (some to the extent of entirely eschewing text content), I become more and more frustrated because Flash insists on downloading and presenting the video content simultaneously. With a slow network connection there is no way for this to work without constant interruptions (3 seconds of video interrupted by ~10 seconds of download, over and over).
Would it be possible to add the capability to request separate download followed by presentation?
Thanks,
Leslie
Would it be possible to add the capability to request separate download followed by presentation?
Thanks,
Leslie
Till Schneidereit
Aug 4, 2014, 4:36:07 PM8/4/14
to jltu...@gmail.com, mozilla-dev-sh.
Hi Leslie,
there isn't too much we can do about this issue, I'm afraid: it's not Flash
that insists on doing things this way, it's video players implemented in
Flash. Flash itself gives the programmer primitives for loading data and
for playing loaded data as video. It also gives the programmer the ability
to determine how much data should be loaded (buffered) before playback
starts. A video player is supposed to implement a mechanism that sets the
buffer to a value appropriate for the connection speed as determined by
observing how fast the data comes in. Getting this right is hard, so most
video players implement it suboptimally.
We could theoretically ignore the buffering setting and always force a
large amount of data to be loaded before beginning playback. However,
that'd cause many video players to break in subtle to spectacular ways.
Plus, we cannot know which behavior is right. Imagine you have a fast
connection and want to watch a movie that's 90 minutes long. You most
certainly don't want to have to wait until the entire video is downloaded.
All in all, the functionality we'd need to change is just too low-level for
us to usefully tweak them. If we were just implementing a video player,
things would be much easier.
cheers,
till
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there isn't too much we can do about this issue, I'm afraid: it's not Flash
that insists on doing things this way, it's video players implemented in
Flash. Flash itself gives the programmer primitives for loading data and
for playing loaded data as video. It also gives the programmer the ability
to determine how much data should be loaded (buffered) before playback
starts. A video player is supposed to implement a mechanism that sets the
buffer to a value appropriate for the connection speed as determined by
observing how fast the data comes in. Getting this right is hard, so most
video players implement it suboptimally.
We could theoretically ignore the buffering setting and always force a
large amount of data to be loaded before beginning playback. However,
that'd cause many video players to break in subtle to spectacular ways.
Plus, we cannot know which behavior is right. Imagine you have a fast
connection and want to watch a movie that's 90 minutes long. You most
certainly don't want to have to wait until the entire video is downloaded.
All in all, the functionality we'd need to change is just too low-level for
us to usefully tweak them. If we were just implementing a video player,
things would be much easier.
cheers,
till
> dev-shumway mailing list
> dev-s...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-shumway
>
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