Autobuffer

I would like to introduce a new video and audio tag attribute to you: autobuffer. Something that is annoying with the current (Firefox 3.5b4) video tag implementation is that the video file is downloaded immediately after the page load. That's problematic if you have several videos on your webpage.

Now (for the next Firefox RC release), the video file isn't downloaded until you click the play button.

If you want to prevent this behavior, just add the autobuffer attribute to your video tag, then, the video file will be downloaded immediately after the page load. Eric Shepherd has updated the MDC documentation:

autobuffer:

A Boolean attribute; if specified, the video will automatically begin buffering even if it's not set to automatically play. This should be used for cases in which it is considered likely that the video will be played (for example, if the user navigated to the page specifically to play the video, not if there happens to be a video embedded along with other content). The video is buffered until the media cache is full.

This attribute also works for the audio tag (see the documentation).

Several sources

That's a very nice feature. It gives you a way to define several source for your video. It's useful in two cases:

  • if you want to provide several formats for your video file (Ogg for Firefox, Mpeg4 for Webkit) - See what Firefox supports here
  • if you want to provide several contents for your video (like a playlist - BTW, we need a demo showing this!)

Eric Shepherd, our MDC master, has added all the useful information about this feature. See the MDC page.

The entry point for all the video and audio cool features

Everything is here: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Us...

Enjoy and update the web!