Resume Video Playback

Firefox Development
#1

Is there a chance that Firefox could be enabled to resume video playback from the last position ?
I mean in general and on all websites and for all videos ?
It is incredibly annoying to have to search through the whole video to find out where you left off the last time and that every single time you close the browser.
I dont know how much time the average user wastes every day finding out “mmhh where was i ?”. If you have a slow internet connection it can be so time consuming to wait for the video to buffer over and over again that users may choose to rather not even finish the video and having to skip the rest (an unknown share of the video) can be very frustrating cause for all you know you might miss out on smth great.
I have seen a few attempts to do that via add-on but so far they have all been rather pitiful. Even focused usually only at youtube they still dont work properly even on that one single website. It seems that this cant be solved per add-on and it does in fact remind me of the “media.autoplay.enabled”-case where also a number of attempts were made to handle the problem via extension and it just didnt work. Until Mozilla stepped in and added the aforementioned about:config-key which solved the problem.

What do you think ?

Thanks.

#2

is bump after 1 year ok ? :slight_smile:

edit: forgot to mention that i am in fact talking about html5 video in particular

#3

I’m not sure how Firefox would store the information.

Session history includes certain data points about a page, such as its cookies. Possibly video progress could be stored there as well, but this may be wasteful for infrequent use.

What about something like a video bookmark where you would designate that you want to load the page and set the player to that particular point in time?

#4

that would be too complicated for most people and me

when i look at my buddies etc. i see that using tabs kinda like bookmarks seems to be very common e.g. if you want to go back to a site later you dont bookmark it and close it but you leave the tab open and it will be restored once you open your browser next time
most people seem to have a tab of certain websites permanently open like facebook for example

and if in that tab is a video it would solve the possibly biggest nuisance online nowadays for many users if it would auto-resume that video

doesnt html5 video support starting a video at a certain point out-of-the-box ? i read that while researching a little (stackexchange - but im not well versed at all at programming)

as for performance: give the user the choice to enable or disable auto-resume so they can decide themselves in the best case on a per-site-basis (or disable it completely)

as for wasteful in terms of disk-space: surely the information stored would be tiny, it requires barely anything but a timestamp connected to the URL of the video, that seems to be barely worth mentioning or am i overlooking something ?
if i am: just auto-delete if the video hasnt been clicked in 30 days or smth

thanks for your time :slight_smile:

#5

A script can record or set the position in the video using this property:

https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaElement/currentTime

What I meant by wasteful was that Firefox would need to be constantly monitoring the time for every page containing a video and recording it to disk. Or would you record it only when the video was paused? That wouldn’t be so bad.

Then the next trick is how to coordinate with the site’s autoplay behavior when restoring the page from cache or refreshing it.

I think someone should try to code it up as an add-on first as a proof of concept.

#6

i think only on pausing would be fine. maybe also an event that is fired when you close the tab/browser ?

as for the autoplay: wont it be possible to disable that in firefox 63 ? i mean it already is but it breaks on some websites and thats meant to be fixed in 63 if im not mistaken. maybe initially only make it available to users who have disabled autoplay if autoplay is a big problem.

as for the proof of concept: i lack the abilities required for that sadly but what about this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/video-resumer/?src=search i dont know wheter it works that way but its meant to resume html5 video playback only on youtube however and also its not 100% reliable i used to use it
also i found this: https://github.com/MorbZ/HTML5-Video-Resumer its seems to be only available for chrome tho
just in case someone more tech savvy is able to do smth with it

thx for your time :slight_smile: