On 1/17/11 4:25 PM, Glenn Maynard wrote:
That's an important use case, but it feels like a very different one.
From a user's point of view it's really not.
If you want to download hours of video for playing offline, you don't want to store that in a transient read-ahead buffer--you want to store it persistently on the disk, so it's not lost if a tab is closed, cache is cleared, etc.
Users don't clear their cache.
It sounds more like a FileAPI use case than a buffering parameters one.
From a user's perspective (which is what I'm speaking as here), it doesn't matter what the technology is. The point is that there is prevalent UI out there right now where pausing a moving will keep buffering it up and then you can watch it later. This is just as true for 2-hour movies as it is for 2-minute ones, last I checked.
So one question is whether this is a UI that we want to support, given existing user familiarity with it. If so, there are separate questions about how to support it, of course.
-Boris
