Streaming video that adjusts to your connection

The last release gave Floati its own decoders for ordinary media files. This one teaches it to play STREAMING video: the technique the big video sites use to send a video in small pieces and switch quality on the fly to match your connection, rather than as one finished file. Before, a page that built its video up from segments as you watched had nothing to show; now the engine assembles those segments and decodes them as they arrive. It handles the shapes real streaming sites actually use: a video delivered as one stream, a video and its sound delivered as two separate streams the browser has to pair up and keep in sync (the common split-track layout), and a stream that steps up or down in resolution partway through as your bandwidth changes. The royalty-free formats - AV1 video, Opus and Vorbis sound - play entirely through Floati's own from-scratch decoders, on every platform, with nothing borrowed and no system decoder anywhere in the path. H.264 and AAC, the patent-encumbered pair inside most .mp4 streams, go to your operating system's decoder as before, so those play too where the OS provides them. Getting here turned up three real playback faults that were fixed, and two of them steady ORDINARY video files as well, not only streams: video frames were being handed to the decoder in the wrong order, so any clip that reorders frames for compression (most of them) could freeze on its opening picture; and two faults specific to a stream that changes quality, where the switched part came out at the wrong size or did not play at all. One honest limit, unchanged: streaming services that lock their video with DRM (the studios' copy protection) still hand playback to the system's built-in player, by design. Everything else - the open, unprotected streaming web - now plays in the engine.