[Commons-l] Broken videos

[Lars Aronsson]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Firefox buffering (and some other applications, no doubt) doesn't
> interact well with short high bit-rate videos.

The video "6hpPowerTrowel.ogv" is 91 seconds long and
52 megabytes (415 megabits) large, streaming an average
4.6 megabits per second. My laptop has 2048 megabytes
of RAM, so buffer space should not be a hardware issue.
Downloading the file over my 10 megabit/second
broadband takes 41 seconds, less than half the play time,
so no buffering should be necessary. The only possible
problem is the browser software.

VLC plays the downloaded video without problems. But
trying to view the downloaded file in Firefox using a
file:// URL doesn't work at all. It stops after a few seconds
and the browser doesn't give up, but continues to "wait".

We can hope that Firefox 3.6 (or 3.7 or 3.8) will solve
such problems, but still we can't expect everybody
to use the latest version. Wikipedia should be useful
in libraries and schools, where users aren't able to
upgrade the browser.

It will be another year or two before video can be
a mature medium (without the kind of Flash player
that made Youtube possible). In the mean time, we
might have to restrict videos to 1 or 2 mbit/s, or
some other arbitrary limitation that make them work.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se