How to start Quicktime streaming immediately

Question

I am trying to make Quicktime files stream from a HTML document using the <video> tag.

The video format is:

Video: h264 (Main), yuv420p, 640x360, 2175 kb/s, 24 fps, 24 tbr, 24 tbn, 48 tbc
Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 104 kb/s

However, the browser does not start playing the video until after downloading the whole file (which takes minutes). I, of course, want the video to start streaming as soon as possible.

The guy who gave me the video files has recollection of some "Streaming friendly" output option in his video editing software that resolved a similar problem earlier. However, many of the video files don't have original project files anymore and thus cannot be regenerated.

So my question is: How can I make the existing video files stream immediately? (I have FFMPEG on my machine)? Or does the solution lie elsewhere?

Answer 1

Another way to move the moov atom to the start to make it play immediately is qt-faststart.

qt-faststart input_file output_file will do the trick.

Answer 2

You need to hint the files so that the mov atom is at the begining of the file. A good tool to do it is MP4Box.

MP4Box -hint input_file.mp4

and then it should be playable immediately.