[Foundation-l] Recommending a Browser for High Quality Ogg Theora Video Support

[Gregory Maxwell]

geni geniice at gmail.com wrote:
> I assume you are pointing to the "Downpreffed VLC because it crashes
> my browser all the damn time -- TS" comment.
> Still another problem with recommending an option is well when this happens:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Videoscreengrab_of_Morris_C8_towing.ogv
> As you can see following the recommended course of action results in a
> far from idea experience. Now to be fair [[File:Morris C8 towing.ogv]]
> is known to cause problems when played but it does work on the VLC
> plugin with firefox 3.0 at least on my system.

Mozilla is quite responsive. (I fixed quite a few video bugs prior to release)

But in this case there doesn't appear to be any real firefox problem.

You've got a >6mbit/sec Ogg/Theora file. The stalling is because
firefox doesn't prebuffer and your connection isn't fast enough to get
ahead of it. Once the file is transferred moving the playhead back to
the start gives smooth video.

Prebuffering can be achieved by setting the autobuffer parameter
before playback begins. The current way video is launched by the site
defeats that. Other playback methods will hold the initial playback
until some buffer has filled, so they don't exhibit the same behavior.

This situation can be improved by managing the buffering process using
JS or simply making good use of autobuffer.

But the real flaw here is expecting a 6mbit/sec file to stream…
Unfortunately until we have some trans-coding infrastructure that will
remain a problem.

I was thinking about running a bot to take all uploaded videos shrink
them to 480px (if larger) and encode at reasonable streaming friendly
bitrates, then uploading back as filename_thumb480 and replacing them
in articles.  I'm not sure how people will feel about that but it will
greatly improve video playability without encouraging people to upload
at low qualities which are completely unsuitable for editing.