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I'm hosting videos on aws S3 at the moment. I can place the s3 url into the src attribute of my tags and everything works correctly and plays as though the video is being streamed to my site. These are not small videos either. Some are 1gb in size. I can also immediately jump to the end of the video as though the entire file wasn't downloaded, but just the part I need.

Whenever I google info on streaming on demand video from aws I get answers that I need a service in front of s3 to do something like this. Is aws automatically doing this for me?

  • S3 acts like a web server, and it supports ranged gets. When you scrub through the video, the video player in your browser simply requests a new range of bytes from S3. The entire file is not downloaded. Also, see [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45900015/how-does-html5-video-seeking-api-work). – jarmod Dec 17 '21 at 13:31

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S3 support partial GET requests. This allows clients to request only a specific part of the file. Most modern players (including HTML5) are able to utilize this feature to provide the experience you describe to the users.

Quoting from here:

HTTP range requests allow to send only a portion of an HTTP message from a server to a client. Partial requests are useful for large media or downloading files with pause and resume functions, for example.

kgiannakakis
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