[theora] Is there something like qt-faststart for theora?

[Chris Double]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Michael A. Peters<mpeters at mac.com> wrote:
> It does not start to play immediately. Firefox twirls it's thumbs for
> several seconds and then when it does play, it's obvious the entire video
> has downloaded.

You don't have the autobuffer attribute on the video so it stops
downloading immediately after the metadata for the video is loaded.
When the user hits play it then starts buffering until it has enough
data to play through the whole video without stopping or 15 seconds,
whichever comes first.

The video is short so on my system 90% of the video is loaded before
it plays. Some things you can do:

1) Add the 'autobuffer' attribute. This will continue downloading the
video so it is less likely that it will need to buffer by the time the
user hits play.
2) Check the bitrate of the video. It may be too high for web video
and so it can never reach the point where it can 'play through'
without stopping. This will result in much of the video being
downloaded for 15 seconds.
3) Even during the buffering stage you can hit 'play' and it will
force Firefox to continue playing.

> The h.264 version of my file also starts to play immediately while still
> downloading, but the theora version doesn't.

I'm assuming you're using Safari or Chrome for testing h.264? I'm not
sure if they support 'autobuffer' so may have the behaviour of
autobuffer being on.

Chris.
-- 
http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz