493860 - Add a pref to disable automatic download of videos (ogg) even if autoplay/autobuffer is set

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

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

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b5pre) Gecko/20090519 Shiretoko/3.5b5pre ID:20090519035556

On websites where ogg videos are embedded which have the autoplay/autobuffer attribute, the whole video gets downloaded until the media cache is full. Selecting pause as fast as possible doesn't help.

This is definitely bad for mobile devices with limited bandwidth and traffic. We should give users the possibility to disable the pre-caching at all. As Roc mentioned on IRC this could be implemented as a pref.

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

As testcase you can use any of the recorded videos on http://air.mozilla.com/.

Comment 2

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

Can you try this with media.autoplay.enabled set to false?

Comment 3

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

setting media.autoplay.enabled to false won't change behaviour here. We'll still download. And this is really a separate issue that needs its own pref.

Comment 4

[Steven Rowat]

Same problem I have I think; I have multiple ogg and mp3 files inside <audio> tags (in <source>, <object> for fallbacks). I can find no way to stop the files from loading completely, which makes the page unusable for up to a minute. Nobody will wait around for that.

AFAIK, at the markup level all I have available is autoplay and autobuffer to control this activity. 

It seems to me that if both autoplay='false' and autobuffer='false' were set, then logically FF should take this as a clear indication not to load anything past the metadata for the media. But it doesn't.

Can this be fixed?

Now, if I can just get Safari and IE to stop autoloading also...

Comment 5

[Matthew Gregan [:kinetik]]

autoplay and autobuffer are "boolean attributes", which have a value of true if the attribute is present and false if it is absent.  Specifying autobuffer="false" is invalid.  See http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#boolean-attributes

If autoplay and autobuffer are not specified on the element, Firefox will stop fetching data once enough has been downloaded to decode the first frame of the video or (for audio only) the audio metadata has loaded.

Comment 7

[Julien Levesy]

Hi everybody.
I'm interested in working on this bug.
I've got experience in c++ but, i'm new to firefox developpement.
So, i don't know really where to start.
Could someone help me to get in ?

Comment 8

[Robert O'Callahan (:roc) (email my personal email if necessary)]

This bug mostly got fixed in bug 631058. See http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/content/html/content/src/nsHTMLMediaElement.cpp?from=UpdatePreloadAction#l988. It looks like we still preload on autoplay though. I think that's OK?

Comment 9

[Josh Matthews [:jdm]]

Please don't modify flags without an explanation.

Comment 11

[Nils Ohlmeier [:drno]]

Mass closing do to inactivity.
Feel free to re-open if still needed.