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I am working on a media based website. I am using JWPlayer for media playback, and using HTML5 mode with fallback to Flash. We are storing the media files on Windows Azure. I want to know - 1) "IS IT POSSIBLE TO DO HTTP PSEUDO STREAMING FROM AZURE BLOB ??" So far, i am able to stream media from Azure, but I am not sure whether it is HTTP Pseudo-streaming or Progressive Download. 2) Is there a way I can check what media streaming protocol a web page is using while playing a video using some tool or browser plugin?

Rahul Patwa
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I think you will find this post helpful Serving Video Content from Azure Blob Storage

It solved my the problem, which i was searching for it from about a year, This will solve the "Seeking" behavior for videos, which works fine with most of players (especially HTML5 video players), but the problem still exists on JWplayer with flash mode, which doesn't support this functionality (ex: Accept-Range: bytes, or Range bytes: 200, 2000).

JWPlayer supports only some kind of pseudo-steraming : Pseudo-streaming on JWPlayer flash mode, I am still trying to solve this issue !!

Community
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Ahmad Dekmak
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    Its extremely strange how azure blobs hide such important setting in such very indirect way ! Thanks for finding and sharing this info – Jalal El-Shaer Oct 24 '13 at 21:39
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HTTP progressive download basically just requires support for the HTTP Range header. Blob storage does support that, so it should be usable for progressive download. Note that progressive download also requires that your video files be formatted correctly, which many video encoders do not do by default.

I have not heard of HTTP pseudostreaming before. Based on my 15 seconds of Googling it seems to be the same idea as HTTP progressive download, but it uses a query parameter instead of the HTTP Range header. Blob Storage will not know what to do with those query parameters, so I would guess it will not support pseudostreaming, though I could be wrong about that. If you wanted to support pseudostreaming, you would probably need to write a web application to interpret the client requests and get the data from Blob storage.

To answer question #2, since both of those protocols are based on HTTP you should be able to use Fiddler (or any other HTTP tracer) to see the traffic.

Brian Reischl
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  • Thanks breischl. I will look into HTTP Range Header. The funny thing is that when we are hosting the website on our own server we have no issues, but when hosting on Azure, a lot of issues creep in. :| – Rahul Patwa Apr 06 '12 at 06:57
  • Another option is using your own web server to front for Blob Storage. Then you can make it support whatever kind of streaming you want to. That's actually what I've done, but I pass the Range headers through to Azure in most cases. – Brian Reischl Apr 06 '12 at 14:25
  • My boss wants to go with Rackspace as the webserver for hosting and streaming media files(using http pseudostreaming). Do you a opinion about that ? – Rahul Patwa Apr 10 '12 at 12:46
  • No I don't. I've never used them and haven't done very much research about them. – Brian Reischl Apr 10 '12 at 14:10