The latest GridRoom release moves all video playback to the Web using a Silverlight-based video player. During my testing I had some problems getting Firefox caching to work properly with video content delivered via https.
At first I tried to deliver all video content over http, not https. But since the secure areas of the GridRoom site are accessed via https I was forced by Silverlight security restrictions to also deliver video content via https for now. (The Silverlight MediaElement does not support cross-scheme access--or mixed http/https content delivery).
During my initial testing with https Firefox seemed to cache video intermittently. Sometimes video was loaded from the cache and sometimes it was streamed again from the Web site, even during the space of a few minutes. Firefox provides an easy way to inspect cache contents using the "about:cache" URL, and after some poking around I noticed that https-delivered video was only held in the memory cache, while http-delivered video was stored in the disk cache. Caching appeared intermittent because my large video files were randomly evicting each other from the relatively small memory cache as I clicked around.
By default Firefox 3 does not use the disk cache for content delivered over https. Users may force this content to be disk-cached by setting the hidden browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl option to true, but this isn't something developers can depend on. The solution is to set a "Cache-Control: public" header for whatever content you want to be disk-cached. This makes Firefox behave like Internet Explorer, which disk-caches https-delivered content by default.
Be careful when using this workaround. The "Cache-Control: public" header tells any caching proxy servers between your server and the client that it's OK to cache your data for use by anyone!
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