On iOS, and I think Safari, we have Apples HTTP Live streaming, which can take a playlist of video files in a certain format, buffer them one by one, and play them seamlessly back to back.
Is there any way to achieve this in other browsers? I can of course detect the video finishing, and then start buffering and playing the next one, but I want to remove the buffering by downloading subsequent videos as each earlier video finishes. I do not want to hack this by stacking up video elements and switching between them. There are various serious consequences to this method.
Perhaps if there is a way to use javascript to download the files into in-memory buffers and somehow point the video element to play from these buffers?
I’ve seen swapping in video elements for each segment tried, and it’s never smooth.
There is an HTML spec in the works that defines exactly the process you’re describing, concatenating media segments into a buffer that can be fed into a media element.
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/media-source/media-source.html
This isn’t available in browsers today but is working its way into Chrome/Safari. Even when it is, it will take a good amount of work to implement this process.
Your best bet if you need it now would be to use a Flash player that can handle HLS, like OSMF, JWplayer, and soon Video.js.