[lxgr]

Both are possible, and in fact I could imagine not all servers being too happy with having to trickle data over a persistent HTTP connection through the entire length of the video, with an almost always full TCP send buffer at the OS level.

[koakuma-chan]

> Both are possible

It is possible if you are in control of the client, but no browser would stream an mp4 file request by request.

> with an almost always full TCP send buffer at the OS level

This shouldn't be a problem because there is flow control. Also the data would probably be sent to the kernel in small chunks, not the whole file at once.

[lxgr]

> It is possible if you are in control of the client, but no browser would stream an mp4 file request by request.

I believe most browsers do it like that, these days: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Au...

> This shouldn't be a problem because there is flow control.

It's leveraging flow control, but as I mentioned this might be less efficient (in terms of server memory usage and concurrent open connections, depending on client buffer size and other variables) than downloading larger chunks and closing the HTTP connection in between them.

Many wireless protocols also prefer large, infrequent bursts of transmissions over a constant trickle.

[koakuma-chan]

> I believe most browsers do it like that, these days

Nope. Browsers send a byte range request for the whole file (`0-`), and the correspoding time range grows as the file is being downloaded. If the user decided to seek to a different part of the file, say at byte offset 10_000, the browser would send a second byte range request, this time `10000-` and a second time range would be created (if this part of the file has not already been downloaded). So there is no evidence there that any browser would stream files in small chunks, request by request.

> in terms of server memory usage

It's not less efficient in terms of memory usage because the server wouldn't read more data from the filesystem than it can send with respect to the flow control.

> concurrent open connections

Maybe if you're on HTTP/1, but we live in the age of HTTP/2-3.

> Many wireless protocols also prefer large, infrequent bursts of transmissions over a constant trickle.

AFAIK browsers don't throttle download speed, if that's what you mean.

[lxgr]

Ah, interesting, I must have mixed it up/looked at range request based HLS playlists in the past. Thank you!

> AFAIK browsers don't throttle download speed, if that's what you mean.

Yeah, I suppose by implementing a relatively large client-application-side buffer and reading from that in larger chunks rather than as small as the media codec allows, the same outcome can be achieved.

Reading e.g. one MP3 frame at a time from the TCP buffer would effectively throttle the download, limited only by Nagle's Algorithm, but that's probably still much too small to be efficient for radios that prefer to sleep most of the time and then receive large bursts of data.

[koakuma-chan]

Realistically you wouldn’t be reading anything from the TCP buffer because you would have TLS between your app and TCP, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that whatever TLS you’re using already does buffering.

[lxgr]

That's effectively just another small application layer buffer though, isn't it? It might shift what would otherwise be in the TCP receive buffer to the application layer on the receiving end, but that should be about all the impact.