On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Tei oscar.vives@gmail.com wrote:
In any case, video and audio are in the same boat as Jpeg/png, +/- some differences in software maturity. There aren't any known or expected malware vectors for them.
Agreed. But seems possible to generate streams of video that crash the browser. So.. probably autoplay is evil. (is already evil because is NSFW since distract coworkers )
Pegging the CPU on a fairly less than very common platform with a copy of firefox which is soon to be outdated is probably not an enormous worry. Growing pains. Of course, it's useful to submit bug reports on this stuff where ones don't already exist.
If you encounter files that break Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari(+xiphqt) please let me know and I'll make sure that a bug gets reported. I'm also happy to fix cortado (The java fallback for clients without proper video support) bugs, — but Wikimedia is using a copy of cortado so enormously old that it's not unlikely that any problems encountered have already been fixed.
In any case, none of the video on wikimedia sits is "autoplay" in the sense that it starts on its own. The video tag itself is set to autoplay, but the tag doesn't get inserted into the page until the user clicks. No video surprises. (Unfortunately this process doesn't give the video tag any chance to pre-buffer the video).