Random Access of Large Media Files on a Remote Web Server

Question

One of our applications currently relies on mapped drives to access large media files (20-100MB) on the local network.

We would like to change this to some sort of web service so that we can make it more secure and move it to a web server (not relying on a local network).

Because they are large media files, we need to be have random access to the files (so that we can start videos from any point).

We have many different types of media files (MPEG, WMV, MOV, AVI, etc...) and would rather not encode them to a specific format for this purpose. We would much rather favor a technology that would allow us to access the file, as if it were a local file.

What technology should we use?

Answer 1

HTTP already supports this natively. However, your clients need to know how to support it. It is the Content-Range header to specify the range to be requested and Content-Length to know the size.

If you need it as a "service" you can use WebDAV as well which provides semantics that would allow you to access a file system. There's a WebDAV Servlet implementation as well which you can use as a starting basis.