[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Accept a colon in the path of a URI, instead of stripping preceding characters.

[Marton Balint]

On Tue, 20 May 2025, Timothy Allen via ffmpeg-devel wrote:

> Good day
>
> I wanted to offer a discussion of the referenced patch.
>
> I have found that, when a link in an extended M3U file (as used by HLS)
> includes a colon, FFmpeg will fail to load the file.
>
> The bug has already been reported: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/10679
>
> The error reads:
> [hls @ 0x78dea4000c80] Failed to open segment 0 of playlist 0 [hls @
> 0x78dea4000c80] Segment 0 of playlist 0 failed too many times, skipping
>
> The referenced patch fixes the issue. However, it is worth noting that
> the patch changes the behavior of one of the unit tests:
>
> - http://a/b/c/d;p?q g:h                  => g:h
> + http://a:b/c/d;p?q e                    => http://a:b/c/e
>
> The original unit test derives from the following two trac tickets:
> https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/8813
> https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/8814
>
> This is a breaking change, and, in particular, violates one specific
> example given in the rfc at
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-5.4 (the first example). In
> particular, it will affect cases where a URL consists only of
> host:port, with no scheme or path, and the base URL links to an
> unrelated host. Where before, the new link would take the form of
> "host:port", the new link will now use "host:port" as the last element
> of the path.
>
> I believe that this behaviour is more intuitive given modern use of
> URIs (and is replicated in many browsers), but I recognise this is a
> matter of taste.

Sorry, but I'd rather not break RFC compliant parsing because of 
problematic files. Feel free however to add some more context to the 
ticket, like which browsers and/or media players support such a file, 
which don't. And how the ones which do support it distinguish between an 
URL scheme and a relative URL with a colon in the first path component, 
e.g.

video:first.ts or http:first.ts

Thanks,
Marton