Video streaming with HTML 5 via node.js

Question

I'm trying to set up a web server that will support streaming video to an HTML5 video tag using node.js. Here's my code so far:

var range = request.headers.range;
var total = file.length;

var parts = range.replace(/bytes=/, "").split("-");
var partialstart = parts[0];
var partialend = parts[1];

var start = parseInt(partialstart, 10);
var end = partialend ? parseInt(partialend, 10) : total-1;

var chunksize = (end-start)+1;

response.writeHead(206, { "Content-Range": "bytes " + start + "-" + end + "/" + total, "Accept-Ranges": "bytes", "Content-Length": chunksize, "Content-Type": type });
response.end(file);

Where "request" represents the http request, type is either "application/ogg" or "video/ogg" (I've tried both) and "file" is the .ogv file that's been read from the file system. Here are the response headers:

Content-Range   bytes 0-14270463/14270464
Accept-Ranges   bytes
Content-Length   14270464
Connection     keep-alive
Content-Type     video/ogg

I've examined the response headers and this code appears to be working fine, but there are a couple of problems:

1. The video appears to load very slowly for being on a local network. From what I can tell examining the response using firebug, the file appears to be streamed in at about 150 kb/sec.
2. The video doesn't play at all. Even if I wait for the whole thing to load, the HTML 5 video tag just shows a big "x" instead of a movie in firefox.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I can do to get video streaming working via node.js?

Thanks!
Chris

Answer 1

I know this is a really old question, but as Google seems to like it I thought it would be worth pointing out that I wrote a Node.js video streaming module (Github, or via NPM) that's hopefully worth a look too.