Surely you can make a post in a blog explaining in detail such limitations or point to an existing one. I'm running a flash-based virtual world and I would be very interested.

Well, there are many considerations to take into account. If that example video is in a totally unsolicited ad, then I understand the user hates it. But if that example video is the only reason because I arrived to that page, hosted in a site called "high-quality-music-videos.com", I wish it takes all the needed resources in my machine in order to play it the best quality and full-screen. I don't ever expect them to have low-quality versions (such as youtube). Or, if I'm offering a full-blown virtual world where you can interact with many people in real time, I'd expect that flash movie to take as much resources as possible to make it an enjoyable experience, just like if you were playing WoW full screen.

I don't really see an "automatic" way to inhibit or restrict resource usage without punishing at the same time good and bad developers.

For me, it's up to the web host the decission. For example, newspapers decide from time to time hosting ads containing hi-res video, loading external contents (ie, facebook data) and maybe with the worst programming available, as the marketing company ordered the developer to make the app so fast, without time for testing and so on... They're paying for the ad. The end-user is consuming 95% of resources to see the add, 5% to reach the contents. So, start the round: don't visit anymore that website or block the ads in your browser. That's the first step to make the things work better, IMHO. I think we should restrict bad habits, but not user habits. I deserve my rigths to install and run crap on my machine. Ie, what kind of "quality control" is that offered in the "app store" for the iPad/iPhone? I have my own quality controls, don't need someone else's, and we can't/shouldn't cap the users.

Your idea of controlling rendering and behaviour looks OK, but difficult to implement. What's up for example with movies not using many graphics resources, but loading 2MB of data only to display the info of all your friends in three social networks. Will you prevent as well loading external and unpredictable content? What if the man hosting the flash movies configures them all as high-quality and, appart from this, places 57 on every page? The "framework restrictions" have been broken. One more barrier is the user (that about "auto" you mentioned). It's the same. Auto or not auto? For me, it would be "auto" for some pages, "low" for others and "none" for most. If think it's better having a good content manager, where you can absolutely kill anything you want, including ads (flash or not flash-based), and everything tailored to your needs.

Anyway, I like that idea about the users having the option to render movies in "low quality mode" if they wish so, at least for that web browsing sessions when you must visit hundreds of sites in the same day ;-) I think this could be a new wonderful setting. And meanwhile a javascript-based extension for the main browsers: setup the "quality" tag to one of the available ones: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash/kb/flash-object-embed-tag-attributes.html#main_Optional_attributes => Although it still can be overrided from within the trojan horse, that's bad!