HTML5 video streaming / seeking

Question

I'm trying to serve videos which are being transcoded on-the-fly. Unfortunately, this means that seeking does not work. I'm assuming that this is because the browser doesn't know how long the video is and therefore can't display a seekbar properly.

Does anyone know if it's possible to hard-code the duration of a video?

The other option I've thought of may be to create my own seek-bar and use JS to update it's position and, if dragged, update the video URL to pass a start-time to the server.

Any suggestions on the best way to do this?

W

Answer 1

You need to provide more info into how this is working on the server. However, here's my generic answer on what I assume is going on.

You have a video in a certain format on your server and it's being served in a different format, I assume for browser compatibility (WebM for firefox etc).

What you should do is have a database for all uploaded videos which keep track of the length in it's original format. Then when transcoding the video to a different format, you can check the database to see it's length instead of trying to pull it out of the transcoding stream.

Use that to create yourself a slider with the length as the max value.

Then set currentTime to the html5 video element using the slider's value.