Nginx and X-Accel-Redirect to serve Quicktime streaming prepared movies

Server NGINX
1

Hi,

Using Nginx + X-Accel_Redirect + Regular Quicktime movies works, but
the user needs to wait for the film to be fully downloaded to watch
it.

Therefore I decided to prepare my movies with the Fast-Start option,
but the movies load barely a few bytes and take ages to play.

Do I need to adjust the content headers or do I need to move to flash
for streaming and using x-accel-redirect?

2

Thomas wrote:

Hi,

Using Nginx + X-Accel_Redirect + Regular Quicktime movies works, but
the user needs to wait for the film to be fully downloaded to watch
it.

Therefore I decided to prepare my movies with the Fast-Start option,
but the movies load barely a few bytes and take ages to play.

Do I need to adjust the content headers or do I need to move to flash
for streaming and using x-accel-redirect?

I ended in this thread from google. Does anyone know how to stream
h.264/mp4 movies to Quicktime player using Nginx+X-Accel-Redirect? I’m
experiencing the same problem.

Does it have anything to do with the moov stuff not at the correct place
in the video?

Cheers,

3

Does it have anything to do with the moov stuff not at the correct place
in the video?

Cheers,

By mooving with mp4box I was able to get progressive download. But it
seems that when I go through X-Accel-Redirect I lose the real streaming
ability.

4

I have found this Rails plugin to easily use X-Accel-Redirect:

So it seems that I might be missing some headers in order to correctly
stream videos?

For http streaming to work with html5, the web server must be able to
server byte-range requests. I know Nginx can do it because I tried it.
Now the thing is to configure stuff correctly so it can do its job.

5

Here is a video I am trying to stream and enable seeking:
http://www.digiprof.tv/uploads/assets/94/original/tie_knot.mp4

This one doesn’t go through X-Accel-Redirect, and it was hinted using
mp4box. Any idea?

6

I can’t make it yet work with mp4 files (hmmm iphone)
Argh! So stupid! There is the mp4 module for that!

7

Ok new test with ogg/theora this time.

Here is my video:
http://www.digiprof.tv/streams/restricteds/9/houmos.ogv

FF3.6 users should see it appear in the html5 video player, but it’s not
the case.

Here is an example of an ogg/theora video being correctly served (by
apache): http://clips.vorwaerts-gmbh.de/big_buck_bunny.ogv

What am I missing? Is it a content type problem? They seem properly set
in my conf file. Other headers maybe? Why is nginx proposing to download
the file instead of streaming it?

Cheers,

8

Fernando P. wrote:

I can’t make it yet work with mp4 files (hmmm iphone)
Argh! So stupid! There is the mp4 module for that!
Hmm it seems the module is made for Flashplayer.

Anyway I tested youtube’s html5 feature (h264 videos) and we cannot
scrub the timeline outside of the downloaded zone, so I guess it’s a
limitation of Quicktime 7.6.6. Maybe it works with QuicktimeX and
iphones, but as I don’t have anything to test I can’t confirm.

9

Fernando P. wrote:

Ok new test with ogg/theora this time.

Here is my video:
http://www.digiprof.tv/streams/restricteds/9/houmos.ogv

It works! Sorry I don’t know what made it work, maybe a header problem
which was not getting updated due to some caching? Maybe I forgot to
restart nginx after adjusting its configuration? Anyway Nginx can stream
ogg/theora videos and let the users seek inside the video!

I can’t make it yet work with mp4 files (hmmm iphone), probably because
the video is not properly encoded for being streamed to the web. I’ll
dig into that tomorrow: moov, fast-start, etc… all painful stuff to
take care of.

Cheers,