> Firefox exposes this stuff just fine: its context menu on videos has “View Video”, “Copy Video Location” and “Save Video As…”. (I thought that Chrome did too, but maybe my memory is faulty or maybe they removed it at some point.)
You're right, I never noticed that. Although I just tried on youtube and the option are there... but greyed out. Not sure why.
As for the various formats, if the web wasn't a javascript shitfest that would be exposed to the browser and it would decide what format it wants to use. That would help with all these websites with a crappy streaming implementation. That would also make downloading very easy, you could just select which format and bitrate you want.
Greyed out because there is no video location for you to view or save. It’s playing a stream, put together from many pieces, so that it performs and functions better.
Switching between sources mid-play is a lot harder than most realise, because random seek is expensive in videos. So instead you tend to treat it as a large number of files of a few seconds each that get glued together as you play it, and you can switch between them as you go.
The web platform could be extended to cover multiple-bitrate streaming and let the browser take control, but that’s a pretty complex affair, and I suspect that it still wouldn’t be enough to make these operations work—the browser would need a way of putting it back together again into one file.
You're right, I never noticed that. Although I just tried on youtube and the option are there... but greyed out. Not sure why.
As for the various formats, if the web wasn't a javascript shitfest that would be exposed to the browser and it would decide what format it wants to use. That would help with all these websites with a crappy streaming implementation. That would also make downloading very easy, you could just select which format and bitrate you want.