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Comment by lambdacomplete | Hacker News Reader

Amazing project, really! But please, for the sake of users (like me) who live in countries where ISPs set a "quota" on DSL connections: ask the users whether they want to start downloading Sintel before doing so :) Now I'm afraid of opening the website again.

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You shouldn't have to "beg" website authors to "play nice" for you, as a user. Web Standards and browsers have failed you by putting that much control into the authors' hands.

It is reasonable to consider that "web" maybe should not have this capability, and web browsers should provide intuitive UI controls for users to enable/disable the ability for sites to do this to you.

To be fair, if the problem is the amount of data that will travel through your connection, there is not much difference between this and a 120MB text-only html file.

So maybe browsers should offer a setting to cap the data retrieved from each individual domain on metered connections, unless instructed otherwise on a domain-by-domain basis?

This is only problem on fast and capped connections which I would guess are rare. On slow connection (and proper browser) you see that it's downloading data, how much, how fast and you can stop it.

4g is fairly fast and generally capped. That is hardly rare.

Oh, you are right. I was under the impression that 4G is something like 2-3 Mbps, which would make the caps somewhat proportional and hard to pass by accident. But I just tried speedtest.net (app) and download speed was almost 40 Mbps. I really had no idea.

ISP offering 100/1000 Mbit connections with a data limit of 2 GB /month is absurd. I think that is the problem here, and not heavy content. Then there are bandwidth monitors ...

I noticed though that the video continued downloading even though I had hit pause.

Author of WebTorrent here. Sorry for surprising you with a large download. To be fair, YouTube autoplays videos too, and the video size is comparable.

Good news, though! Looks like we can use detect users on a metered connection with `navigator.connection`, or worst case look for a mobile user agent. Thanks for the feedback!

Or, you know, you could ask users if they want to download it :-).

It seems to be done as a demo right now. Why not just add a big red "click here for a demo" thing?

There are very few things that you can reliably find out over the web. Whether or not a connection is metered isn't one of them.

Or a "The download will begin in 10 seconds. Press the pause button to stop it"

Even in big cities in India people only have 1 or 2 GB per monthly limit on their broadband connection for their PCs.

It would be better to use a manual approval rather than a automated detection.

When I visit youtube, I know that the video is going to start immediately but that wasn't the case with this.

> or worst case look for a mobile user agent

Please don't. There's nothing special about mobile devices that inherently makes them metered, so please do not assume this.

Could you explain please, how can it work in Firefox with media.peerconnection.enabled=false? What exact features of WebRTC are you using?

I don't go to youtube to read. You've got something genuinely extremely useful, but at the moment you are poisoning the well.

I appreciate that it sucks for you personally (I used to have a capped connection myself), but frankly the web should not be held back by such arbitrary limits.

A demo that starts working immediately with no input required is a LOT more impressive and impactful than something behind a "try" button.

129.24 MiB is actually really small for a 15min video.

Not to mention those of us with cell phone plans that have bandwidth restrictions. This could be very bad for our phone bills.

Even worse, if you are using a firewall it will block and potentially throw warnings about all of the connections that the site is trying to setup. I had a deluge of Little Snitch dialogs that showed up again when I backed up to the home page. The whole thing should really be behind a "try it now" button.

Yeah, took me a second to realize why one of the tabs I opened from HN was trying to do NAT STUN traversal

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