I'm converting my video to mp4 H.264 with ffmpeg than changing the moov atom to front with qt-faststart, so I can stream the video.
Everything works fine with small videos 5-10 minute, but when it comes to large ones 1-2 hrs it can take a significant time to start playing. it loads 6-10mb and only than start playing the video.
In flv that's not the case, it plays immediately no matter how large the video is. How can i fix that?
It is just the nature of the formats. The moov atom contains all the metadata for every frame of audio or video in the file. So, the more frames, the larger the moov. By putting all this metatadata in one place, it makes seeking within a file much easier. Once you have downloaded the moov, the player knows exactly what byte in the file to request to seek to a specific frame or time. An FLV file is sent one frame at a time, there is no index of frame locations, this makes seeking extremely difficult for the player.
You can try making the moov smaller by ensuring your video is not in variable frame rate, and that you do not have unnecessary data (such as movie posters) embedded in the metadata. Having the server send gzip streams may help as well as the moov should compress well.
