Streaming MP4 via HTTP

Microsoft introduced “Smooth Streaming”  that provides seamless bit rate switching of video by dynamically detecting the network conditions. In order to deliver the media, they have used MP4 container. Normally, a MP4 file format contains a header and media data where the header contains the metadata information. In order to use it for streaming the header information should be placed in the beginning. But, the traditional MP4 file has the header information at the last. The diagram below shows the traditional file MP4 file format.

To move the header file in the beginning we have used qt-faststart that can be found in : /ffmpeg/tools/qt-faststart

qt-faststart input.mp4 output.mp4

The format of output.mp4 will be as following: