1242245 - Decode only used parts of video/audio

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1224973

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect)

Description

[Djfe]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0
Build ID: 20160120154102

Steps to reproduce:

This bug report is about the HTML5 video and audio tags.
And it's not really a bug rather a feature idea, if it's not implemented, yet.


Actual results:

Does Firefox actually decode stuff that is invisible/inaudible?
I wasn't able to find any information about this on the internet.
So I hope you aren't annoyed at me for opening a bug report for this.


Expected results:

Firefox doesn't need to decode video, only the audio, if you are browsing in a different tab.
This could potentially save a lot of CPU time or power (even with hardware acceleration enabled)
Videos on a webpage that aren't visible fall in the same category (whether by a css rule or caused by you scrolling down to let's say the video's comments)


The same thing could be applied for audio if the speaker icon on a tab is clicked to make it silent.

The Demuxer would still keep on running but the decoder would be disabled.

I'm not sure if this is really possible, especially since Videos contain lots of reference frames.
And if the pros outweigh the odds (calculations whether the video is visible)

But maybe it's enough already to use the Demuxer's cache to get everything till the last I-Frame (or IDR depending on the Codec)

Looking forward to your feedback.

If you know/think this is a really bad idea or if it's implemented already, don't hesitate to close this report ;)

Comment 1

[Anthony Jones (:ajones, :kentuckyfriedtakahe, :k17e)]

Dan - can you dup this?