Progressive Downloads - Previewing movie clips while downloading
 

Hi,

My computer is connected to other computers. Sometimes, I would like to access shared video clips from other people's computers. With Windows Media Player, I could just double click on the file and quickly skim through the entire clip. However, with Linux, I'll have to download the entire file before I could watch it on mplayer. Even if I open the file while it is downloading, I can only watch the first few parts of the file which have already been downloaded without having the option to fast forward to later parts. Is there any solution which can allow me to preview a video file while it is still being downloaded.

Thanks.

Well, viewing parts of a movie which have not been downloaded yet is not what you intend, right? Just peeking thru parts which were already downloaded.

You can ff to a later moment:

mplayer -v -forceidx -ss 0:26:00 playfile.rm

starts playback a 26 minutes, 0 seconds

Now I do this with audio files, but it should work with video files as well. I can do this with files which are being donwloaded or complete files.

jlinkels

Actually, it's more like I want it to download the video clip starting at a specified point so that I could start watching at the middle of the clip instead of the start. You know, in Windows Media Player, if you are browsing through video clips on the network, you could start at the middle of the clip and Windows Media Player will buffer that portion of the clip first so that you could watch it while the rest of the video file gets downloaded. But, I'm not sure if there's a way of doing this in Linux.