3 ms·
Have you ever tried to range into a file with variable-length encoding? It doesn't go so well. This is one of the reasons (a little stale IMO, but historically
by eropple 4y ago
Have you ever tried to range into a file with variable-length encoding? It doesn't go so well. This is one of the reasons (a little stale IMO, but historically reasonable) that the received wisdom for podcast formats is to use CBR audio, so as to make the naive seek algorithms used when streaming more reliable. Video's bigger and the human tolerances are smaller.
There are very, very smart people working on making video readily consumable over the internet. If "just use HTTP range requests" was a viable answer, I tend to think they'd have done it.
- teddyh 4y agoThen, clearly, what we need is a seek-friendly video encoder.
- eropple 4y agoOkay, I'm stumped. Why do we need a "seek-friendly video encoder", which will compromise video quality and file size, when DASH and HLS define seeking in a more flexible and effective way that also allows for adaptive streaming and content steering than "range requests for a multi-gigabyte file" ever will be?
- teddyh 4y agoSure, if the indexing can be handled out-of-band to enable more efficient video encoding, then do that. But this means that the media is no longer a single stream of bytes, which complicates things. It’s always simpler, and therefore better, to have media self-contained in a single file of bytes.