PAYPAL Homepage: HTML5 video is so smooth, how?

[Verahta]

https://www.paypal.com/us/home

I inspected the page and they are using HTML5 video. My question is, how is it so smooth with almost no loading time? Is it just because it's a small video file or what is the technique here?

Thanks for any insight into this.

[Jackolantern]

I would assume because it is so small. It is only a few seconds long, so probably isn't even 1mb, which will load almost instantly even for slow broadband.

[MikuzA]

It seems that it's 2.2MB in size, but I would say the biggest thing in this is the .webm.

If you compare the loading of these two,

https://www.paypalobjects.com/webstatic ... bsite.webm
https://www.paypalobjects.com/webstatic ... ebsite.mp4

From my point of view the webm starts earlier than mp4. But not really sure what is the difference in these formats for real
But it's awesome to see this kind of stuff nowadays..

10s in that 'awesome' resolution = 2.2MB, that's kinda cool.
I saw this earlier and got some awesome Ideas to making more cooler websites of this.

[Jackolantern]

MP4 is the highest quality format that is decently supported, but it has a complicated chain of patents that made some vendors dislike it. WebM is Google's combination of VP8, Vorbis and Matroska into a single container. It is noted for being free of patents, but other browser vendors have been slow to adopt it since Google created it.