[vlc-devel] Bug in HTTP access module

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 14:21:38 +0100 (CET), jpd at m2x.nl wrote:
> For one, why does it more http requests than others? What causes it and
> what can be done to alleviate that?

It sometimes needs to seek the media. While the stream layer reduces the
need for seeking through caching, it cannot eliminate it, especially for
idiotic file formats like AVI.

Browsers don't seek. Downloaders only seek when restarting a download.

> For another, does vlc support http keep-alive and if not, how hard would
> it be to implement such a thing?

Keeping connections alive across input files is not possible inside a
plugin.
I think the complexity/usefulness ratio is definitely against doing that.

Keeping connections across seeks is not directly possible. There is no way
to interrupt a running HTTP response, but to hangup and reconnect. Bill
Riemers tried to "fix" that by sending bound range requests last year. He
reported that this was totally useless, as the stream layer was doing
better optimizations anyway.

Last, it is worth noting that the current HTTP access is a big pile of
spaghettis. Compare to the FTP access, which is doing practically the same
thing and combines input and output in a single file. The HTTP access is
already quite difficult to maintain. Any great extension will only make
things worse, unless it involves a complete cleaner rewrite.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont