Download And Cache Management For Html5 Hypervideo Players

Web videos are becoming more and more popular. Current web technologies make it simpler than ever to both stream videos and create complex constructs of interlinked videos with additional information (video, audio, images, and text); so called hypervideos. When viewers interact with hypervideos by clicking on links, new content has to be loaded. This may lead to excessive waiting times, interrupting the presentation {especially when videos are loaded into the hypervideo player. In this work, we propose hypervideo pre-fetching strategies, which can be implemented in players to minimize waiting times. We examine the possibilities offered by the HTML5 < video > tag as well as the Media Source Extensions (MSE). Both HTML5 and MSE allow element pre-fetching (video and additional information) up to a certain granularity. Depending on the strategy and technology used, beginning scene waiting times and the overall download volume may increase. The strategies presented in this paper allow the number of delays during playback and the overall waiting time of a video to be reduced significantly from an average of 8.1 breaks to less than one break. The overall waiting times can be reduced by one third, to less than 18 seconds improving the hypervideo watching experience.