891995 - better handling for media clip timeouts

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webmaker Graveyard :: Popcorn Maker, defect)

Description

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Right now a clip times out at 10 seconds.

If I clip times out, it continues to play the media even though a clip is not loaded.

On complex projects with bad internet, it times out pretty consistently. Making a project seem pretty much broken.

We should up the timeout, and possibly make it a property on the media clip, so it can be reduced if needs be, with a default higher than 10 seconds. We need to consider the use case of someone wanting to lower this first though, as I'm not convinced.

I'm going to play with different times on a throttled internet, on a lower quality machine. See what works best, and test from there. We should also consider removing the timeout all together.

Either way, 10 seconds does not cut it.

Comment 1

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org/pull/113

I'm proposing we remove the timeout altogether. The purpose it serves is small, and it is doing more harm than good.

The idea of a timeout is to stop clips that are never going to load. I don't think it does a good job at this. Instead it wrecks projects that would be playable if they waited a bit longer.

If we have valid clips that are never loading we can consider adding back a longer timeout, but, I've never seen one of these clips. We usually fail on things we can detect, like error events and clips that have embed disabled, which, both of these require solutions that are not timeouts. We should handle these cases in the proper way.

Comment 2

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Staged: https://github.com/mozilla/popcorn.webmaker.org/commit/2d0ec1ef652e7c8f83b90ac21aff1ce928ee761e