media buffer

[soldstatic]

So I'm playing with the movie and multimedia support, using a divx avi to be precise.

when I click on the avi on my desktop (where the installation of cpg is) the movie (a 45 min episode of a TV show) comes up fairly quickly. only takes a few minutes, like 1.

I then accessed the same installation and video file from my laptop. After I changed the default avi player to windows media I cliked on the file through CPG. tooks forever, like 10 minutes to start playing. I'm guessing my laptop had to buffer or download the entire video before playing... Is that true?

Does CPG stream the video?? Is it possible to get it to stream the video? I just would rather be able to watch the video (perhaps while it downloads) or something faster. ie if I'm on a different computer, i'd like to watch the video w/o having to download the entire thing first.. perhaps it could buffer for a while, but not the length of the entire movie? I dunno... I know nothing of how to encode stream video or anything.

Watching these videos through CPG is really awesome!! Thanks for all the greatness you guys! I love being able to access my divx from another computer on my network. (still having issues with HDD space and stuff [but that issue is in another thread]) but as soon as that's cleared up, total kick ass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Nibbler]

It's all up to your browser and how your media plugins are setup. Coppermine doesn't do any streaming itself it just provides the means for your browser to do so. You may find a setting on it somewhere for how much buffering you want.

[soldstatic]

cool, thanks!

any tips where these settings might be for IE and windows media player?

any way to force stream and make it so (hopefully) nobody can download the files?

[Joachim Müller]

coppermine doesn't stream videos, you need a particular web server setup to actually stream video files. Regular webhosting accounts don't come with streaming setup. In other words: no, you can't stream videos.
Additionally, I don't think that Windows Media Player actually plays DivX movies, at least I haven't heard of that. After all, the file extension "avi" is just a container for hundreds of different codecs, so you can't judge by the extension. The fact that the video plays on your desktop app in the DivX player by default doesn't mean that it's actually DivX-encoded.
Coppermine has got nothing to do with all this; basically, it just "tells" the browser the browser "Hey, I have got a movie file here. Do with it whatever you think you should do with it.". If the browser and/or OS "knows" what to do with the file, it will be played in the app that the browser "knows". If it doesn't know what to do with a file, it downloads the file. That's about it.

[soldstatic]

interesting thanks! the webserver is actually installed on my desktop PC. granted it's not accessible outside of my network but that's perfectly fine with me as i own everything in it and I don't want to mess up any copyright stuff.

i think its  divx and i know windows media player can play divx. well i'm almost positive... i'm 95% sure that the file i was watching was divx encoded. but eh who knows.

thanks for all the great info!
do you guys know any php scripts or softweare packages or anything that will stream video??
looks like that'll be the topic of my next sourceforge search.

well, thanks for the great stuff guys. keep it up!

[soldstatic]

ok actually i've been looking around online and what not, and streaming isn't neccessarily what i'm looking for. i think CPG will work perfectly for me if i can just figure out how to get the video to start playing w/o DLing the whole thing first (and then of course continue DLing while viewing). but that's obviously on my end.

at any rate, i know there's another thread on using custom thumbnails so i'll have to check into that stuff (i don't really like the glaring avi thumbnail for all the movies, i would rather have logos of the show or whatever). but that's another story.

now i just need to figure out how to get CPG to add files from another harddrive to its collection...