Seeking through a streamed MP3 file with HTML5 <audio> tag

Question

Hopefully someone can help me out with this.

I'm playing around with a node.js server that streams audio to a client, and I want to create an HTML5 player. Right now, I'm streaming the code from node using chunked encoding, and if you go directly to the URL, it works great.

What I'd like to do is embed this using the HTML5 <audio> tag, like so:

<audio src="http://server/stream?file=123"> 

where /stream is the endpoint for the node server to stream the MP3. The HTML5 player loads fine in Safari and Chrome, but it doesn't allow me to seek, and Safari even says it's a "Live Broadcast". In the headers of /stream, I include the file size and file type, and the response gets ended properly.

Any thoughts on how I could get around this? I certainly could just send the whole file at once, but then the player would wait until the whole thing is downloaded--I'd rather stream it.

Answer 1

Make sure the server accepts Range requests, you can check to see if Accept-Ranges is in the header. In jPlayer this is a common issue in Webkit (particularly Chrome) browsers when it comes to progress and seeking functionality.

You might not be using jPlayer, but the Server Response information on the official website may be of some use.

http://www.jplayer.org/latest/developer-guide/#jPlayer-server-response

Answer 2

but I had the same problem. Its necessary to set some headers for media file response.

as example:

Accept-Ranges:bytes Content-Length:7437847 Content-Range:bytes 0-7437846/7437847 

Then audio tag will be able to seeking