We’ve been experimenting with H264 video and were missing the much needed ‘seeking’ functionality.

You can watch a demo or read more about it on the wiki.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop us a line.

I’m looking into seeking for h264 files. So far I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not as simple as mod_flv_streaming (the lighttpd plugin). You can’t just simply seek in a h264 file and pass that data to the flash player. It doesn’t like that it all.

So I’ve been thinking along the lines that a new lighttpd plugin (mod_264_streaming?) needs to be a smarter. I.e. it reconstructs the necessary h264 headers (so-called ‘moov’) and then send the movie data (‘mdat’) starting from the seekpoint.

The thing is: this is quite a bit of work. Everytime somebody seeks in a file the plugin has to parse the original h264 headers, fix up all the offsets and then send the result back.

My guess is that this may work, but at the same time something tells me that there must be a simpler/easier way to achieve seeking.

If anyone has any ideas or links to other articles it’s much appreciated.

References

- What just happened to video on the web?

- Stream h.264 with PHP script?