How do you do true streaming with the video tag (i.e. not progressive download)? (html5)

Question

I have cheap Apache PHP hosting. I have a mp4 and or Ogg video file. I want to dynamically stream this video to users. And let those users see it through HTML 5 video player.

How do you do true streaming (being able to scroll to any part of the video without previous download of full video) with the video tag (i.e. not progressive download) and Apache PHP?

Waken

Forgive my ignorance but what is the difference? – Dioecious

being able to scroll to any part of video with out previous download of full video is the difference, I think. – Broom

Yes, that was edited in just now. This depends on the server. If the server is able to respond with partial downloads, the video tag should take advantage of it, but it depends on the video format, the browser and possibly the video player it uses. If the server does non-resumable downloads, this won't work. – Dioecious

Answer 1

There appears to be a slight mix-up between "true" streaming and "pseudo" streaming here. I believe true streaming is when video is streamed from a specialist media server over a streaming protocol such as rtsp, rtmp or mms whereby the media is not first downloaded before being available for viewing. I don't think any browser supports this with HTML5 - at least I've yet to see any support for it.

Pseudo streaming appears to be the one that you want, but it is still basically progressive streaming the only difference being is you tell the server at what position or time in the file you want to start streaming from.

Here is an example of HTML5 video using time offsets to move to any part of the video. It should give you all the information you need to try it out for yourself.

Ashwell