Video On Demand by HTTP protocol (not Streaming)

[heretic13]

I create this topic in the continuation of an existing topic:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=20699&start=0

Here's an official statement on the site VideoLAN about VOD by HTTP:
http://www.videolan.org/doc/videolan-howto/en/ch11.html

I tested this mode at various source media files.
This mode is not working as it should!!!

Rewind or does not work or works very strange.
The duration of video is not shown, but for audio is shown!!!

All modern Web-servers supports to resume downloads, partial downloading and others.
I already wrote that it provides the necessary set of functions for reading the file, read from any position and recognition file size.

Working with such data must not differ greatly from working with local files.

The problem has no solution 4 years now.
For reference: Winamp supports playback of HTTP-source and works great (but I tested only on audio files).

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

VLC has supported playback from HTTP over 8 years now. It works fine for me and a number of other people.

[heretic13]

I found out that it depends on the files. Some files are played fine, but some are not via HTTP. But all files are played well as local files.
If I give you a few of these files (which are poorly played over HTTP) you acknowledge error in VLC?

Let me remind you - these files are playable well as regular files.
I can put them on any public file server (rapidshare / deposit / letitbit) where you can download them for testing. This is my collection of video clips, files less than 100 megabytes (and maybe 50 megabytes) each, but this is enough for testing.

My configuration:

Client: VLC v. 1.1.2 The Luggage on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (I suspect that on other versions of Windows will be the same). I agree - I should have another test on Linux.
Server: Apache 2.2.15 on a platform of "last" (snapshot) Gentoo amd64
IPv4

[heretic13]

Some of these files are also poorly played through FTP. Symptoms are the same - the inability to rewind, the duration of the video does not show in.

Perhaps this is a common mistake VLC to play through FTP and HTTP (possibly the algorithm can access files via FTP / HTTP wrote the same programmer or by the first algorithm was used as a basis for writing the second algorithm).

Server: Proftpd 1.3.2d on a platform of "last" (snapshot) Gentoo amd64

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

That's perfectly normal. Some file formats are not suited for remote playback, typically they require (fast) random access, which is not possible with HTTP and FTP.

[heretic13]

You want to say that the VLC source code include code where explicitly checked the speed of operation "fseek"? Something like multithread code where the thread № 1 performs "fseek", and the thread № 2 controls the thread № 1 of run-time operations "fseek"? If the thread № 1 is not returned control of the "fseek" over N milliseconds, then we accept the condition that the media source does not support rewind/seek?

Do I understand correctly algorithm?
You want to say that for a very slow hard drive (or for heavily fragmented file system), we will observe the same situation?

[heretic13]

I did some tests. I noticed that the *. mpg files are played well, but AVI is usually bad. Where can I see a list of possible combinations of "file container" + "video codec" suitable for VOD (with support for display duration + rewind)?