Re: [OT-ish] WebM/Ogg VP8 streaming

On 05/22/2010 11:20 PM, Chris Double wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Christopher Blizzard
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>   
>> I would suggest that we push to change that.  Live streaming is a pretty
>> great use case.
>>     
> I'm not so convinced that live streaming is such a great use case with
> HTML5 video as specified. There's no way for a browser to identify
> something as a live stream. When the browser buffers the stream falls
> behind and the user can't 'catch up' without restarting the stream
> manually. There have been so many complaints about this sort of thing
> with live streaming using <video> that I think it'd be better to
> either add stuff to the <video> spec to make live streaming support
> better, or live stream using a different protocol (and build support
> in the browsers).
>
> Chris.
>   
Chris,

This has always been the case when using Icecast for live streaming, but
it's never /prevented/ Icecast from being used for that very same
purpose.  Any client that falls behind will just have as much buffer as
the server allows.  Depending on connections, this can lead to minutes
of streaming without interruption to hours - it all depends on the
quality of the connection.

I don't see what implementing this in the browser changes compared with,
say, watching or listening to a live stream in a client application,
which faces all the same problems, right?