Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration and computations involved, though. This seems like a matter for the user, not the Web page, though. Ah, I knew you were going to say this. I agree, but I can also imagine that the way the user selects this is by choosing one of two different resources from a page, just like we do today for videos of different bandwidths. It seems better to have a way for the user agent to automaically negotiate the right bandwidth usage based on user preference, too. Any setting like this that we offer authors _will_ be misused, possibly as often as used correctly. Unless there's a really compelling reason to have it, it seems better to let the user be in control. If users can choose between two links on a page labelled high FPS - will destroy your battery and low FPS, they are in control, in a way that is easily understood by the user and allows them to make the choice at the point in time that it matters. Compare this with changing the streaming settings on QT Player or Windows Media Player, or even toggling the use the video card button on your laptop (and hoping that the content is smart enough to degrade gracefully instead of choking). Agreed. That isn't my concern. My concern is with pages that only provide one version, and that version tweaks this setting inappropriately. I believe, based on our experience with how pages are written on the Web today, that pages that do that would far outnumber those doing it right. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E)\._.,--,'``.fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A/, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Aug 2, 2010, at 7:20 PM, Dirk Pranke wrote: On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration and computations involved, though. This seems like a matter for the user, not the Web page, though. Ah, I knew you were going to say this. I agree, but I can also imagine that the way the user selects this is by choosing one of two different resources from a page, just like we do today for videos of different bandwidths. It seems better to have a way for the user agent to automaically negotiate the right bandwidth usage based on user preference, too. Any setting like this that we offer authors _will_ be misused, possibly as often as used correctly. Unless there's a really compelling reason to have it, it seems better to let the user be in control. If users can choose between two links on a page labelled high FPS - will destroy your battery and low FPS, they are in control, in a way that is easily understood by the user and allows them to make the choice at the point in time that it matters. Compare this with changing the streaming settings on QT Player or Windows Media Player, or even toggling the use the video card button on your laptop (and hoping that the content is smart enough to degrade gracefully instead of choking). But an author can't make that claim if it involves forcing the GPU on or off. If we were to do this, I'm sure there would be implementations where the exact opposite of the author's intent would be the result. Saying something like turn off the GPU can result in more or less battery usage, depending on the hardware, software and content. Preserving battery life should be the job of the system (possibly with I care more about battery life than quality input from the User Agent). We've seen this exact same argument play out over the last fifteen years in video on the web. The technology for detecting and adjusting bandwidth dynamically has been around forever (actually implemented, even), and yet for every one multi-bitrate stream available on the web, I imagine there are very many more that are single-bitrate. A big part of the reason for this is because doing it this way is (in my opinion) a better user experience. Sure, you might be able to say that a lower bitrate video will use less power than a higher bitrate one. So the author might want to provide two videos. But leave it up to the system to decide what hardware to use to play them. - ~Chris cmar...@apple.com
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Chris Marrin cmar...@apple.com wrote: On Aug 2, 2010, at 7:20 PM, Dirk Pranke wrote: On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration and computations involved, though. This seems like a matter for the user, not the Web page, though. Ah, I knew you were going to say this. I agree, but I can also imagine that the way the user selects this is by choosing one of two different resources from a page, just like we do today for videos of different bandwidths. It seems better to have a way for the user agent to automaically negotiate the right bandwidth usage based on user preference, too. Any setting like this that we offer authors _will_ be misused, possibly as often as used correctly. Unless there's a really compelling reason to have it, it seems better to let the user be in control. If users can choose between two links on a page labelled high FPS - will destroy your battery and low FPS, they are in control, in a way that is easily understood by the user and allows them to make the choice at the point in time that it matters. Compare this with changing the streaming settings on QT Player or Windows Media Player, or even toggling the use the video card button on your laptop (and hoping that the content is smart enough to degrade gracefully instead of choking). But an author can't make that claim if it involves forcing the GPU on or off. If we were to do this, I'm sure there would be implementations where the exact opposite of the author's intent would be the result. Saying something like turn off the GPU can result in more or less battery usage, depending on the hardware, software and content. Preserving battery life should be the job of the system (possibly with I care more about battery life than quality input from the User Agent). I think you're probably right that different systems can have different performance profiles and you can't design a one size fits all solution here. Perhaps instead of enable GPU / disable GPU you need high complexity / low complexity as a hint to the user agent. We've seen this exact same argument play out over the last fifteen years in video on the web. The technology for detecting and adjusting bandwidth dynamically has been around forever (actually implemented, even), and yet for every one multi-bitrate stream available on the web, I imagine there are very many more that are single-bitrate. A big part of the reason for this is because doing it this way is (in my opinion) a better user experience. Sure, you might be able to say that a lower bitrate video will use less power than a higher bitrate one. So the author might want to provide two videos. But leave it up to the system to decide what hardware to use to play them. Of course, you can also imagine a lower bitrate stream using more power than a higher bitrate run (VP8 may be more efficient than MPEG-2, but can't be decoded in hardware and hence is far more expensive). Perhaps all this illustrates is that the problem is far from simple and so no simple API is likely to be that helpful. I'm not sure ... -- Dirk
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Sat, 1 May 2010, rya...@mail.com wrote: My suggestion for the HTML5 spec is that the video tag should have a feature that can enable GPU acceleration on a user's graphics card, so it will take some stress off the CPU. Do you like my suggestion? Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? On Sun, 2 May 2010, Simon Fraser wrote: The only reason I can think of why this should be exposed to web authors is if a browser is unable to use GPU accelerated for video without side effects (like always rendering on top of the rest of the content). Such an option would be similar to the wmode param on plugins, which is a huge mess, and should be avoided at all costs. One of the benefits of video being a real HTML element is that it respects CSS properties like any other element. Indeed, it seems like we'd just want this to be automatic. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E)\._.,--,'``.fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A/, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Sat, 1 May 2010, rya...@mail.com wrote: My suggestion for the HTML5 spec is that the video tag should have a feature that can enable GPU acceleration on a user's graphics card, so it will take some stress off the CPU. Do you like my suggestion? Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration and computations involved, though. -- Dirk
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:43 PM, Dirk Pranke dpra...@chromium.org wrote: On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Sat, 1 May 2010, rya...@mail.com wrote: My suggestion for the HTML5 spec is that the video tag should have a feature that can enable GPU acceleration on a user's graphics card, so it will take some stress off the CPU. Do you like my suggestion? Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration and computations involved, though. That's a decision for either a user or a user agent, not an author. It should not be toggleable from HTML. - James -- Dirk
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration and computations involved, though. This seems like a matter for the user, not the Web page, though. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E)\._.,--,'``.fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A/, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration and computations involved, though. This seems like a matter for the user, not the Web page, though. Ah, I knew you were going to say this. I agree, but I can also imagine that the way the user selects this is by choosing one of two different resources from a page, just like we do today for videos of different bandwidths. -- Dirk
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Ian Hickson i...@hixie.ch wrote: On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote: Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU acceleration? I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration and computations involved, though. This seems like a matter for the user, not the Web page, though. Ah, I knew you were going to say this. I agree, but I can also imagine that the way the user selects this is by choosing one of two different resources from a page, just like we do today for videos of different bandwidths. It seems better to have a way for the user agent to automaically negotiate the right bandwidth usage based on user preference, too. Any setting like this that we offer authors _will_ be misused, possibly as often as used correctly. Unless there's a really compelling reason to have it, it seems better to let the user be in control. If users can choose between two links on a page labelled high FPS - will destroy your battery and low FPS, they are in control, in a way that is easily understood by the user and allows them to make the choice at the point in time that it matters. Compare this with changing the streaming settings on QT Player or Windows Media Player, or even toggling the use the video card button on your laptop (and hoping that the content is smart enough to degrade gracefully instead of choking). We've seen this exact same argument play out over the last fifteen years in video on the web. The technology for detecting and adjusting bandwidth dynamically has been around forever (actually implemented, even), and yet for every one multi-bitrate stream available on the web, I imagine there are very many more that are single-bitrate. A big part of the reason for this is because doing it this way is (in my opinion) a better user experience. That said, I do also agree that it opens up the possibility for abuse or incorrect usage (just like it's possible to send a HD stream down a modem line). And, I'm not actually advocating a solution here one way or another, just attempting to answer your question. -- Dirk
Re: [whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec
On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 8:25 PM, rya...@mail.com wrote: My suggestion for the HTML5 spec is that the video tag should have a feature that can enable GPU acceleration on a user's graphics card, so it will take some stress off the CPU. Do you like my suggestion? Nothing is stopping browsers from using the GPU to help speed up video playback right now, and in fact I think that some browsers are either already doing so, or are planning to do so in the relatively near future. ~TJ
