[FFmpeg-devel] [Patch] Prohibit Seeking on m3u8 files over http

[Jan Ehrhardt]

Micah Galizia in gmane.comp.video.ffmpeg.devel (Sun, 30 Dec 2012
14:00:17 -0500):
>I have encountered problems trying to play HLS streams on certain servers
>due to the "Range: " request header field used in http.c. When the server
>sees this field for m3u8 files it responds with a 403.

You should not want to solve these problems at the client side. It is
the server job to correctly handle such requests.

>Given that seeking doesn't really make sense for playlist files (...)

Seeking makes perfect sense for on demand HLS streams. In fact the lack
of support on the client side for seeking in HLS streams is one of the
obstacles for the acceptance of HTML5 video. See
http://www.longtailvideo.com/html5/hls/

The linked m3u8-stream at that page is perfectly seekable. I checked
that in the Wondershare player on my Android tablet:
http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/gear1/prog_index.m3u8

Jan