Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately John is entirely wrong, about Firefox at least. Firefox does not buffer the entire media when autobuffer is not present. I don't know how he came to that conclusion, but just check out this page as an example:

http://pearce.org.nz/video/bunny-poster.html

Note that the progress bar on the controls does not turn to a lighter shade of gray until you press play - this means Firefox isn't buffering data unless you press play.

John's blog post is wrong.

View on HN

You may be correct for Firefox but on the latest Chrome beta, my progress bar looks blue both before and after I press the play button - there is no indication to me as to whether it is buffering or waiting for input.

I'm on yesterday's Chromium build on a Mac, and here was my test. Go to the page, don't click, wait, wait some more, keep waiting, wait, some more wait. Then, try to drag the video to the half-way point and start play from there.

Result? The video jumps back to the beginning of the play cycle. Thus, I deduce, it ain't loading. Firefox 3.5 here, no autobuffer. Safari does as Gruber says and starts loading immediately.

Here's an article from Mozilla going over this http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/autobuffering-video-in-fire...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com