Playing a large/long h264 file with NetStream takes a LONG time to begin playback

Question

I'm trying to play a 10 minute long video (h264/mp4) which is 39MB in size, after I call stream.play(fileURL) it doesn't start playback until its loaded around 12-16MB of the file (many many seconds later), I finally get onMetaData at this point too. Why doesn't it begin playback right away, or at least w/in a couple seconds? What can cause this bloated lead in time?

Thanks

Answer 1

Are you a media server, such as Red5 or Flash Media Server?

If not, the code will use progressive download and won't start playing until a certain amount of the file has downloaded.

Answer 2

I'm not on a media server, this is a normal http request.

It appears that for some reason some of our video files aren't being run through qt-faststart. I tried the 10min video and it took 15 seconds to start, then ran it through qt-faststart and after that it started instantly.

So the solution here is qt-faststart :)