Preload and buffer

Preloading in the Ivory Player

Preloading

To make the transitions from one clip to another as smooth as possible, the Ivory Player tries to preload as much as it can. With a lot of clips and time jumps, it is important to know in which ways the preload processes work so you can build your project with the best result. 


Video quality based on bandwidth 

When the viewer presses the play button, the Ivory Player first sends some small files to the viewer to determine its bandwidth. Based on this it starts loading the highest quality of the videos with the smoothest play experience with this bandwidth. It will keep doing this throughout the entire video, so when the bandwidth changes, the quality changes accordingly in order to keep everything smooth.


Preload per browser

Every browser limits the number of videos that will be preloaded simultaneously. The maximum differs per browser and version, but in general it is between the 6 and 10 clips at a time.  This means that when a viewer presses the play button, Ivory Player will preload at least the 6 first clips. At the time of writing this article, Google Chrome can load the most amount of videos simultaneously.


What does it load?

When we say preloading, we mean that Ivory Player preloads only the first few seconds of a clip. With the calculation made from the video quality on bandwidth, it should be able to load the rest of the clip while playing only the first few preloaded seconds.

What is the preload priority?

The first thing the Ivory Player loads, is (of course) the first videoclip. Then it starts checking the timeline for buttons or jump interactions to learn what the next possible outcomes can be. So although your second clip might be earlier in the timeline, if the buttons or triggers first give the options to go to other clips, these will be preloaded before the second clip will be preloaded.

*as variable triggers can have unlimited options for jumps, these are NOT taking into account

*if there is a start in the middle of a clip (e.g. by a jump trigger), Ivory Player will also preload the first few seconds of the middle of this clip, so even these jumps are as smooth as possible.


What's next?

As long as the ‘buffer size’ of the browser is not filled, the Ivory Player will keep on preloading the first few seconds of the rest of the videos with again a priority to clips from action moments.


What happens when the buffer is full?

When the browsers buffer is completely filled, the browser will delete some the video preloads from its buffer after some time to make room for other preloads. The browsers cache memory does sometimes keep the clips in its memory.

Other Media

Audio is being preloaded in the same way. This means that an audio clip will also be counted as one of the 6 preload slots of the browser. Images are not being preloaded this way.





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