Video streaming with HTML 5 via node.js

Question

I'm trying to set up a web server that will support streaming video to an HTML5 video tag using node.js. Here's my code so far:

var range = request.headers.range; var total = file.length;  var parts = range.replace(/bytes=/, "").split("-"); var partialstart = parts[0]; var partialend = parts[1];  var start = parseInt(partialstart, 10); var end = partialend ? parseInt(partialend, 10) : total-1;  var chunksize = (end-start)+1;  response.writeHead(206, { "Content-Range": "bytes " + start + "-" + end + "/" + total, "Accept-Ranges": "bytes", "Content-Length": chunksize, "Content-Type": type }); response.end(file); 

Where "request" represents the http request, type is either "application/ogg" or "video/ogg" (I've tried both) and "file" is the .ogv file that's been read from the file system. Here are the response headers:

Content-Range   bytes 0-14270463/14270464 Accept-Ranges   bytes Content-Length   14270464 Connection     keep-alive Content-Type     video/ogg 

I've examined the response headers and this code appears to be working fine, but there are a couple of problems:

1. The video appears to load very slowly for being on a local network. From what I can tell examining the response using firebug, the file appears to be streamed in at about 150 kb/sec.
2. The video doesn't play at all. Even if I wait for the whole thing to load, the HTML 5 video tag just shows a big "x" instead of a movie in firefox.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I can do to get video streaming working via node.js?

Thanks!
Chris

Answer 1

I know this is a really old question, but as Google seems to like it I thought it would be worth pointing out that I wrote a Node.js video streaming module (Github, or via NPM) that's hopefully worth a look too.

Answer 2

I was able to get this to work with some help from the nodejs forums:

http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs/browse_thread/thread/8339e0dc825c057f/822b2dd48f36e890

Highlights from the Google Groups thread:

Google chrome is known to first make a request with the range 0-1024 and then request the range "1024-".

response.end(file.slice(start, chunksize), "binary");

Then:

I was able to get the video to play no problems in firefox by setting the "connection" header to "close"

Then:

Seems that you are incorrectly computing the content-length:

var chunksize = (end-start)+1;

If start is 0 and end is 1, in your case chunksize is 2, and it should be 1.