When downloading a large video you can begin playback while it is still named .crdownload.

Once upon a time, this worked fairly well. Chrome would fail to rename the file to remove the ".crdownload" part. This would fail since the file was locked for read by the video player. The user would have to manually rename it but that wasn't so bad.

At some point, we added the ability to resume downloads. This is a great feature. But it caused a problem with the above scenario. When Chrome would hit an error when renaming the file, it would instead delete the file and restart the download. This would kill video playback and generally be wasteful of bandwidth.

There was a work-around where you could disable the resume-downloads feature in chrome://flags. But that was removed.


User reports:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/n8JqBz5Q2_I/I88JF6X3AQAJ
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/jqrxCz_Eplg