Although this has similarities to How to serve videos like Youtube? Almost instant play and fast seeking that question was 10 years ago and I am wondering if things have changed since then.
I've been playing around with apache2 with chrome as the client trying to serve CCTV videos that allow responsive seeking as you would naturally desire. These are not super high quality videos - maybe 150MB per 15 minute file. The encoding is h264, recorded from a rtsp stream onto a pi with no conversion (ffmpeg copy).
Using mp4 as the container I am getting 'seekable' video but its not great performance. It takes a couple to a few seconds to catch up each time you seek to a different location.
This is on a LAN with 100Mb to the pi. Meanwhile youtube via the internet (only adsl) can seek instantly and is overall far more responsive.
I understand that youtube have their own technology but is it really the case that only youtube can get this performance with their software and general setup? Their CDN can't be responsible because I can download the a file from the pi by SSH to the client computer far faster than a download from the internet here.
Its a brand new install of RPI OS with up to date apache2 etc, and range request is working. Ideally, I don't want to transcode the video if I can help it - but if it turns out that that is the only way then so be it.
But my concern is that I am doing something wrong - using the wrong format perhaps.
So two questions really - is serving an mp4 containing h264 to vanilla chrome as good as I can do in terms of being responsive to seeking the video, without transcoding (ie while still using the original h264 stream).
And if I did transcode it whats the very best free setup to facilitate very fast seeking video, both for fast and slower link speeds?
