The latencyHint attribute gives web authors influence over how much decoded output must be buffered for a user agent to begin playback or resume following a seek. The most obvious use cases would request lower latency. For certain applications, prioritizing smoothness over latency makes the wrong trade off. Examples include interactive video applications like cloud gaming and desktop streaming, where users must immediately see the effect of their inputs.

Motivation

In the other direction, some sites may prefer latency to be higher than the UA default. For example, the non-real-time video use-cases mentioned earlier (movies, tv, vlogging, ...) may choose values like 300 or 500 msec to reduce the chance of decoder stalls.

Documentation

Specification

Public discussion

Status in Chromium

Blink>Media


Proposed (tracking bug)

Consensus & Standardization

After a feature ships in Chrome, the values listed here are not guaranteed to be up to date.

Owner

Search tags

latencyHint,

Last updated on 2021-01-07