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.header         


        

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.

Answer 2

Based on Sam9291's answer, I rewrote the function using createReadStream() and fixing some problems:

/**
 * Sends a static file to the HTTP client, supporting partial transfers.
 * 
 * @req HTTP request object
 * @res HTTP response object
 * @fn Path to file that should be sent
 * @contentType MIME type for the response (defaults to HTML)
 */      
function sendFile(req, res, fn, contentType) {

  contentType = contentType || "text/html";

  fs.stat(fn, function(err, stats) {
    var headers;

    if (err) {
      res.writeHead(404, {"Content-Type":"text/plain"});
      res.end("Could not read file");
      return;
    }

    var range = req.headers.range || "";    
    var total = stats.size;

    if (range) {

      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;

      headers = { 
        "Content-Range": "bytes " + start + "-" + end + "/" + total, 
        "Accept-Ranges": "bytes", 
        "Content-Length": chunksize, 
        "Content-Type": contentType 
      };
      res.writeHead(206, headers);

    } else {

      headers = { 
        "Accept-Ranges": "bytes", 
        "Content-Length": stats.size, 
        "Content-Type": contentType 
      };
      res.writeHead(200, headers);

    }

    var readStream = fs.createReadStream(fn, {start:start, end:end});
    readStream.pipe(res);    

  });

}