Seeking in Video/Change Video Player

[weelkin]

Hi there,

i`ve just setup a subsonic installation for testing purposes. So far everything seems fine, it`s really a cool programm indeed. But one thing bothers me: I can`t seek in videos with the embedded flash player. I`ve tried various files, but i was never able to seek within the video. Also i haven`t found a way to change the video player. Is it possible to either enable seek with the embedded player (preferred option), or change the player type so that the video would be played by my lokal player as a e.g. xvid stream?

thanks in advance
weelkin

[GJ51]

JW Player will play mp4 video without transcoding. If you send an mp4, untranscoded directly to JW it will load the video and buffer it. Once the red seek bar shows the video is loading ahead of playback, you can use the seek bar to move around. Just don't try to go too far ahead until the video is fully loaded.

[weelkin]

Thanks, but what if the video is not mp4? How can i find out if my video file i mp4?

regards
weelkin

[GJ51]

Just look at the file extension.

I use AVS video converter to transcode various formats.

[weelkin]

I`ve played around with different files and found one where i at least can seek with the drop-down menu next to the Kbps drop-down menu. The progressbar is red where i already watched the video, but i`m still not able to seek within the red part of the progressbar.

This is the file where i can select the minute in the drop-down menu:
file testA.avi: testA.avi: RIFF (little-endian) data, AVI, 624 x 352, 25.00 fps, video: XviD, audio: MPEG-1 Layer 3 (stereo, 48000 Hz)

This is the file where i can`t select the minute and the progressbar is not moving forward.
file testB.avi : testB.avi: RIFF (little-endian) data, AVI, 624 x 352, 23.98 fps, video: XviD, audio: MPEG-1 Layer 3 (stereo, 48000 Hz)

Any hints on how to convert any arbitary video file to a format where i can fully seek within the video? This must be done on my ubuntu server perhaps with ffmpeg?

Thanks in advance,

weelkin

[GJ51]

Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on all the ins and out of video file structure and transcoding. Like yourself, I find that some work and some don't and I haven't yet pinpointed what determines the behavior seen with different files. I'm not sure if it's just a matter of file format, or if the seek indexing information needs to be already encoded in the original source file. In other words, I don't know if you can make a file seekable if it wasn't recorded in a format that provides that information.

Maybe we can get a few others to chime in on this topic and enlighten us both.

[mherber2]

im intrested in the same thing but have not been able to set it up. I have heard alot of talk about the provider being http insteam of video but I have not been able to get this working.