Advanced Video Streaming aka HTTP Range Requests

[lastmjs]

I'm attempting to do the work to claim this bounty: https://twitter.com/dominic_w/status/1467144071449915395

It seems like implementing HTTP Range request functionality will achieve video streaming, and beyond that audio streaming and really any kind of file streaming. I'm not exactly sure what is in scope for this bounty, but I hope to receive guidance on what is acceptable along the way.

Tentatively I'll be following this guide: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Range_requests

I'm not sure how much of it needs to be implemented, as some functionality might not be necessary to have excellent video streaming from most clients/browsers

Required functionality

• Range header
• 206 partial response
• Content-Range header
• Content-Length header
• 416 response

Possibly optional

• Accept-Ranges header
• HEAD requests
• Multipart ranges
• If-Range header
• Certification
• Protection against denial of service (range numbers that are too big, too many ranges)

[lastmjs]

An update on my progress. I have 206 partial responses somewhat working. I am now able to load a video player into the default Chrome video view and skip around. http range requests are made at any point in the video. The problem is that I now need to stream each partial request, because they could be over the ~3 MB limit. I'm hoping this won't be too hard.

[paulyoung]

@lastmjs can you clarify if you are only working on streaming response data, or also on streaming request data?

[lastmjs]

Only response data

…

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[paulyoung]

I realize that the scope of your work probably relates to the bounty, but it seems like we’ll also need to support streaming uploads as well.

Otherwise, I think the size of the video and audio files involved would be limited by what can be uploaded.

[paulyoung]

I believe one limitation here is the 2MB message size.

[lastmjs]

Uploads are easily chunked by the client, as can be seen by dfx being able to upload large file sizes

[paulyoung]

Right, but that means people need to use dfx.

I think the code from the certified assets crate that dfx uses would need to be used by icx-proxy to enable arbitrary-sized file uploads from other clients in general.

For web-based apps that probably needs changes to the service worker as well.

[lastmjs]

What I meant by that is it's easy enough to chunk even from a browser client when uploading. As I understand it the browser client would just need to do what dfx does, which is split the files to be uploaded into appropriate binary chunks and use the update functions on the asset canister. They wouldn't be able to do it all in one http request, but neither does dfx. And this should be possible on the browser, someone just needs to write the code. I've done something similar with my own file example (using a Sudograph canister).

Changes to the asset canister shouldn't be absolutely necessary, but perhaps it would be preferable to implement streaming uploads. But Dfinity is working on increasing the ingress message size limit anyway.

[paulyoung]

I’m thinking of the use case where an app is trying to (or limited to) make a regular HTTP upload without any special handling.

It also fits into a category of things that could be moved upstream so that every one who wants to do that doesn’t need to implement the same thing.

[lastmjs]

Yeah I agree that would be great. I think for now it might be best to move this functionality into the JS agent, and then arbitrary sized ingress messages I would hope will provide a true fix.

[lastmjs]

Just ran into a major issue. I've deployed the canister to production and filled it with assets, but partial responses aren't working in production. I wonder if the boundary nodes are filtering out the response headers.

I added the following response headers:

1. Accept-Ranges
2. Content-Range

Is there some whitelist in the boundary nodes that needs to be edited? @roman-kashitsyn @nomeata

[lastmjs]

More info in this forum post, @jplevyak has said he will talk to the team and see about getting this addressed: https://forum.dfinity.org/t/boundary-node-http-response-headers/10747