Http Range support in player + browser plugin

Henry Ping wrote:
> Hi, Ken
> 
> Our browser plugin does leverage the browser's HTTP
service to download the
> content. Back when the plugin was developed in late
'90s, before HTTP1.1 was
> standardized, there's no difference between our HTTP
dwonlaod service vs the
> Browser's. The latter has slight advantage when the
site requires
> authentication, instead of being prompted multiple
times, the user is
> prompted once if we let the Browser do the download.
There could be
> additional reasons I am not aware of.
> 
> We added some smarts in our plugin for IE, when we
detected the content
> exceeding certain size, we will transfer the download
to our own HTTP
> service for the rest of the content. This is why you
see the byte-range
> support in IE. We did this only for IE because there's
technical issue that
> prevents us from doing the same in Mozilla at the time
we did this change.
> 
> To workaround this, you can wrap the URL to the content
in a RAM file. The
> browser will download the RAM file, our browser plugin
will handle the
> actual content URL within the RAM(either HTTP or RTSP)
>  
> We're going to take another look of our browser plugin
solution. I think it
> makes more sense now for us to use our own HTTP service
in order to take
> advantage of some HTTP1.1 features(i.e. persistent
connection and
> byte-range).
> 
> -->Henry
> 

Thank you, Henry.

  From my perspective, using the browser, vs the players
internal HTTP
handler is fine, though for authentication and session
(cookies) it
seems like it may be easier to use the browser's engine.

In any case, IE seems to be fine, and as you say, Moz is
not. Do have
any Mozilla-bugzilla IDs that we can reference about this?
Or can you
say what specifically the technical-issue is? Just want to
dig in
further and see if I can help (if only raising awareness).

I also understand that the Moz embedding API (interface also
used by
recent Safari builds) underwent a substantial upgrade a
couple years
ago.. not sure of that fills in the missing piece.

Thanks,
Ken



_______________________________________________
Clientapps-dev mailing list
Clientapps-devhelixcommunity.org
http://lists.helixcommunity.org/mailman/listinfo/
clientapps-dev