Watching video over FTP on latest dev 0.9

[ghuron]

First of all I would like to thank you developers of this product - VLC 0.9 is the only player, which I can use successfully to watch video over FTP. Majority of the players, that pretends to do so actually download the whole movie to the hdd and only after that start playback. 0.8.6 has a problem with TypeI response, which is fixed in 0.9 But I have a couple of observations regarding this functionality:

• When I'm specifying URL for the movie in the corresponding dialog, I have to encode all spaces to %20 manually. This is quite annoying, but probably very easy to fix
• When I'm specifying DivX movies located on ftp, VLC told me that index is broken. When I'm playing the same movie from the local hdd, there is no problems
• When I'm playing movie from ftp, slider does not work. It neither show progress, no I'm able to seek to the desired position. I believe it is caused by the same problem as issue with indexing

My questions are:

• Are these well-known issues, or should I report them in bug-tracking software? If you need my report, do you need any additional details to reproduce them?
• If I would like to fix those issues by myself, can you please tell me where in the source code I should look first?

Thanks in advance, and keep up great work!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Hello.

1) please report this as a bug and set the owner to funman.
2) and 3) are normal since AVI are bad files, and we can't know the length of the file before downloading it.

[ghuron]

Thanks for replay, but can you please clarify what exactly the problem with determining .avi size over ftp?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Yes. Imagine that the size of the AVI is determined at the end of the file.

To get the correct length, you have to get the whole file...

[ghuron]

Most of ftp servers support SIZE and REST commands. What is the algorithm of determining the size?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Well, there is a difference between having the size of the binary and having all the indexes information. Anyway, AVI isn't a muxer for video on a network.

[ghuron]

We can use REST for getting any piece of the file without downloading the whole binary
I understand this is not a primary use case, but for me this is very convinient. I have linux wifi-router and hdd connected to it via USB. By default hdd is shared via ftp, in principle I can setup samba here, but ftp is more lightweight and robust. Can you please point me out where I can start looking in the source code, and I will try to submit patch?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Read the svn code. But seriously, I just doubt that you can achieve what you want with AVI format.

[ghuron]

If it works locally I do not see why it cannot work on FTP using SIZE/REST

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Because for video streaming, you need to know where the I,B-Frame are, knowing the exact size of the AVI isn't enough.

[ghuron]

Comparing logs, produced by VLC, that opens the same file over ftp and locally, I can see it does parse all chunks in the file header. The difference starts when it said "skipping movi chunk". libavi requests access module whenever "STREAM_CAN_FASTSEEK", file-module reported TRUE, ftp-module reported FALSE. So when we are opening file locally, it sais:

avi debug: skipping movi chunk
avi debug: found Chunk fourcc:31786469 (idx1) size:2751200 pos:384894784
avi debug: idx1: index entry:171950

In case of ftp, libavi stops further processing:

/* If we can't seek then stop when we 've found LIST-movi */

I can see two options here:

• libavi should not use FAST_SEEK, but normal SEEK instead (ftp seems to implement it). I'm not sure I understand what is the difference
• we need to implement FAST_SEEK in ftp utilizing REST (if server support it)

Can you please advise me in which direction I should follow?

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

/me can't

[ghuron]

Sorry for bothering you - last question What is the typical practice in this project to obtain such knowledge? This was introduced to the file 3 years ago by fenrir. Should I ask this question in mailing list (I can see only svn-deamon mails there)? Or should I ask somewhere else?

[VLC_help]

IRC is a good place =)