Can you use HTML5 local storage to store a file? If not, how?

Question

How would one go about caching / managing many large files (videos) on a user's computer via browser mechanisms (plugins are acceptable solutions). From what I can tell, local storage is about database type data, not files.

Answer 1

The FileSystem API[1,2] was going to be your best bet going forward, at one point it was very much bleeding edge. However it has been been abandoned by w3c. From their own documentation:

Work on this document has been discontinued and it should not be referenced or used as a basis for implementation.

1. http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/
2. http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/file/filesystem/

Answer 2

HTML5 FileSystem API is dead as others have said. IndexedDB seems to be the other option. See here.