MPG Doesn't stream correctly

[YamahaR1]

I made an MPG file.

I put it on our website.

If you right click the link, and say "Save Target As", and download it, it works fine. Its 3:14 long.

But if you just click the link, and stream it into windows media player, it cuts the end off for everyone. Its only 3:09 long.

I have no idea why and cannot figure it out. I am going through a short download counter script, that refreshes with the link.

And, how can I invoke a download, rather than allowing it to stream?

Either fix would work.

-Dan

<Sorry, no personal URLs. See TOS [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 7:11 pm (utc) on Sep. 9, 2004]

[korkus2000]

I believe you can only force a download if you zip the file or alter the mime type on the server. Otherwise it will launch a program to execute that file. Strange that it cuts off. What happens at the end. Does it freeze or close? What is the OS of the server?

[py9jmas]

I would suspect this is a limitation of MS Media Player. Mpeg streams arn't really designed with HTTP streaming in mind. Mpeg video uses a mixture of forward and reverse prediction, ie you may need to know frame 20 before you can calculate what frames 18 and 19 look like. I reckon this is just MS Media Player getting it wrong.

You can suggest to the browser that the resource should be saved instead of handed off to a helper application with the "Content-dispositon" HTTP header
[faqs.org...]
but it is really a matter of how the browser is configured.

[YamahaR1]

What does it do? The video is 3:14 long. Sometimes, when you click and watch it in media player, its 3:09 long. Normally I wouldn't care, but my dude wins the fight at the last four seconds. Media player doesn't report an error or anything. It really thinks its 3:09s long.

So I get all these emails, "Who won?"

Regonizing the other solutions, is there a trick in perl I can use to invoke download? Maybe on the redirect change the content-type statement? Gah...

We plan to add more, so maybe when I create the other clips, I will add a lil bit of blank space to the end. Hoakey, but effective to a point.

While on the topic, I am using ULEAD Visual Studio 8. However, unlike cheaper programs, it has no option to reduce the frames per second or kbits/s. I'd like a 3 minute clip to be smaller than 30mb due to space and bandwidth.