Please do, the time has come. David said the following…
It’s a mix really,
In browser mode then it will download and play however the browser is configured to do that.
Nfs or in a virtual drive then it will be “downloaded” and played, but as many players do it will only need the parts of the stream at any one time. So here the download is a few chunks at a time to a memory based disk (which clears copies). So in many cases here it won’t actually touch the local hard drive. The code reads from the network through the VFS to the application (which thinks it is on disk).
These are two of the methods really. If we had portable browsers (firefox has a portable copy AFAIK) then these will also load from the network to RAM and again think they are looking at a local hard drive when playing.
So a couple of mechanisms in play here that can be toyed with over the tests. Using local apps will probably mean download and play, but if they use the vfs to find data then it can be secured and limit what touches the drive (we need to consider app caching locally as browsers do, but if the cache is pointed to the vfs then it’s much better and you take all your settings and cache with you from machine to machine.
[EDIT - I should add that a while back I mocked up what I think is a nice way for this to work. on login (I use linux) have the PAM modules use SAFE login which then gets the root dir of your SAFE drive and mounts that as /home/hash-user and logs you into the computer. Then your whole home drive is in SAFE and apps you install there (including libs etc.) will move around with you. This can be extended to select the proper app per OS, and with musl compiled apps then dependency free). That experiment will start up again when we get teh vfs back up and running as a stand alone). ]
To which you replied:
@dirvine: Using local apps will probably mean download and play
Nah, we can use the offsets in the request to get pieces and stream them right over HTTP to where we want. The real thing to fix here is to stop having the safe_launcher base64 the contents after they all have been received. Instead, have the launcher API send (and receive on the modify for content stuff) HTTP data like any other web server might when handling a file (you could go one further here and have some awesome webdav support, but that may be a bit much). If we need to support encrypting that API responses data, we could look at some local TLS or something…but we really need to stream it.
SAFEnetwork is described as occupying layers 4-6 in an OSI model, so any discussion of streaming video should be confined to those layers…agreed?
I’m eager to unsterstand how streaming can be achieved point to point on SAFE, without CDN;s, POP’s, Servers,
Seriously, lets nut this out…I was under the impression that no http streaming would be required to deliver great video over SAFE,make me understand why I was wrong.