On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
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.
Yes, but the browser isn't psychic. It doesn't know how long its going
to take to download the file. Before it starts it doesn't know how
quickly the buffer is going to drain. Waiting for the whole file to
load is not generally acceptable. (Nor is consuming unbounded amounts
of memory ... what happens if you hit a gallery page with 100 of those
52 mbyte files on it, should the browser download and store 5GBytes of
data?)
So the browser takes a best effort guess. On very high bitrate files
it gets it wrong. The consequence is a stutter or stall, and on short
enough files on Ubuntu (or, I expect, 3.5 on any
alsa-pulseaudio-wrapper GNU/Linux system) it looks like it can also
trigger the waiting-for-audio-after-pause bug.
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
Why don't you test it? Firefox 3.6 has been out for half a year.
FWIW, It doesn't fail in 3.5 for me, but I'm not using ubuntu.
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.
Multi-megabit/sec files are not going to stream for most users
regardless of the player technology... that isn't something that
improved client software is going to fix.
It appears that you've hit a case where it fails worse than it should
or could, but your configuration isn't one of the most popular and
the consequence of the failure is (primarily) that the video doesn't
work. It seems to If you're unhappy with the video performance of
your client software, upgrade your client software, or switch to using
the cortado player option. The site should remember your preferences.