youtube functionality

[Chromajux]

I am currently creating a custom movie player with controls. Many of the videos have very large file sizes and I would like to have the same type of functionality that YouTube has; The ability to jump ahead of the download point, drop the cached portion and start at the new point if the user tries to scrub past the buffered portion. Is this type of functionality possible without the use of a media server, or can it be done on any server?

[rob day]

With progressive downloads you can't seek beyond the downloaded portion of the clip, so you would need to stream your FLVs from a media server in order to seek to anywhere on the FLV timeline.

[Greg Dove]

There was a way to do this profiled a few years back without a streaming media server by just requesting a future portion of the flv from a php script.
http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2005/11/2/Streaming-flv-video-via-PHP-take-two

This required an additional step though: injecting additional metadata into the flvs for seekable bytepositions, so that only 'seekable' timepoints were requested from the flash client - I think these were at video keyframe points. I'm not sure if this type of thing is possible with the newer h264 encoded videos etc, I can't recall anything mentioned about that.