Forum Discussion

SolveLLC's avatar
SolveLLC
Visitor
15 years ago

Multiple HTTP requests when loading video

I've noticed this before but it's never been a problem until now. When a video is selected and starts to buffer, 6-7 http requests are sent to our servers requesting the file. Is there a way to change this behavior to a single request?
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3 Replies

  • RokuMarkn's avatar
    RokuMarkn
    Visitor
    15 years ago
    Are you playing an MPEG-4 file? If so, the multiple requests are necessary to read the various parts of the metadata which are quite inconveniently scattered around at different places in the MPEG-4 container. If you look at the byte-range requests you should see that it's seeking around to different parts of the file.

    --Mark
  • RoadRanger's avatar
    RoadRanger
    Streaming Star
    15 years ago
    I've seen certain MP4 files where the "thrashing" increases the further into the video you go until it gets to the point of overloading the rather low-power web server I have on my NAS and crashes it 😞 . If yous guys are actually wanting to work on this issue I could turn on logging and attempt to see what's really going on for ya 🙂 . I'm guessing it is re-reading some parts of the file over and over again rather than caching it ?
  • RokuKevin's avatar
    RokuKevin
    Visitor
    15 years ago
    We require that the web server hosting the video content supports range requests. My guess is that your NAS server does not.

    --Kevin