Swap the mp4 index when uploading

[ascom]

When I upload a mp4 video to my test WordPress installation (running on a free hosting service), the video does not load and play right away in Firefox, which requires flash player. This is because many video converters/exporters (such as Openshot, which I used for the video) do not web optimize the output. The flash media element wants to download the whole mp4 before playing at all.

WordPress should swap the index to the beginning (like ​http://renaun.com/blog/code/qtindexswapper/), so the video loads right away in the player. Attached is the exported video and a screencast demo.

[ascom]

Unoptimized video exported from Openshot

[ascom]

Screencast demo of the delay in loading

[wonderboymusic]

WordPress does not encode or transcode video - that is the end user's responsibility.

[ascom]

Replying to wonderboymusic:

WordPress does not encode or transcode video - that is the end user's responsibility.

I disagree - since many users of WordPress are not so tech-saavy, they may not care about their export settings. I believe it is necessary to prevent confusion among users.

Also, I found a C-implementation of an index swapper - ​https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/tools/qt-faststart.c. Maybe someone could port it to PHP?

[helen]

We haven't found a good path to rotating images based on EXIF data yet (see #14459) - this seems even harder to manage in distributed software. Going to go with maybelater - there's no viable path forward, and who knows if this will still be the case by the time there is one.

[ascom]

I found a couple of PHP implementations for swapping the index...I actually might want to write my own plugin. :-) I don't see why it would be difficult to run this script on uploaded videos.

​https://github.com/clickalicious/qt-faststart.php
​https://gist.github.com/Thinkscape/3756836