Playing an online MP4 causes a long buffering

Question

I am trying to play an online MP4 http://www.elecard.biz/clips/mp4/misc/River.mp4 With WMP 12 that ships with win7 RC. The media does play but the Buffering takes ~3 minutes which makes it appear that the file is being downloaded before it is playing. Once the media has been played, subsequent Play causes it to start instantaneously, seemingly reinforcing the idea that its now reading cached contents. I was reading on some forums that for Mp4 files, metadata may be located at the end of the encoding causing the entire file to be downloaded before it starts playing. Could this be happening. In that case is there anyway to stream the file and not cause it to buffer for that long?

Thanks and Regards, Nandini

Answer 1

It appears that this particular video did not have the moov atom/box located at the beginning of the file, as a result of which it would download the entire file before it would start playing. Another MP4 worked perfectly fine

Answer 2

You can fix it with, for example, MP4Box from GPAC (http://gpac.wp.mines-telecom.fr/)

Something like $ MP4Box -ipad

Answer 3

Apart from the moov atom/box you have to use a GOP for streaming, I use a GOP for each second of video using FFmpeg, so if the video is 30fps I use a GOP of 30, on other encoders the GOP is called "Key Frame Distance" and it is the same thing, this setting enable the user to seek randomly any second into the video.