On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:38:01 -0500, James Graham <[email protected]> wrote:
Jeremy Doig wrote:
Measuring the rate at which the playback buffer is filling/emptying
gives a
fair indication of network goodput, but there does not appear to be a
way to
measure just how well the client is playing the video itself. If I have
a
wimpy machine behind a fat network connection, you may flood me with HD
that
I just can't play very well. The cpu or video card may just not be able
to
render the video well.Exposing a metric (eg: Dropped Frame count,
rendered
frame rate) would allow sites to dynamically adjust the video which is
being
sent to a client [eg: switch the url to a differently encoded file] and
thereby optimize the playback experience.
Anyone else think this would be good to have ?
It seems like, in the short term at least, the "worse is better"
solution to this problem is for content providers to provide links to
resources at different quality levels, and allow users to choose the
most appropriate resource based on their internet connection and their
computer rather than having the computer try to work it out for them.
Assuming that the majority of users use a relatively small number of
sites with the resources to provide multiple-quality versions of their
videos and use a small number of computing devices with roughly
unchanging network conditions (I imagine this scenario applies to the
majority of non-technical), they will quickly learn which versions of
the media works best for them on each site. Therefore the burden of this
simple approach on end users does not seem to be very high.
Given this, I would prefer automatic quality negotiation be deferred to
HTML6.
Flash has low, medium and high quality that the user can change (although a lot of
sites/players seem to rudely disable that option in the menu for some reason). This helps
out a lot and can allow a video to play better. I could imagine an "Auto"
option too that automatically switched quality as necessary to get decent playback.
As an event, a site could use it like:
video.onplaybacktooslow = function() {
this.quality = "low";
this.setToNativeSize(); // stretched videos use more cpu
};
Or, something like that.
--
Michael
