Support for HTTP range requests (for FileResponse)

I’m trying to embed an mp4 file on a page using the following HTML:

<video controls width="600">
    <source src="/media/video.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

The video file is being served by a Starlette FileResponse.

I’m getting this error in Safari:

It looks to me like Safari is trying to make an HTTP range request in order to stream the video - but Starlette doesn’t support that option.

I tried adding accept-ranges: none as a response header but that didn’t seem to fix the problem.

So… it would be great if Starlette could handle range requests so you could use it to serve video files to Safari!

[simonw]

I’d be disappointed to see this not land in Starlette. I’d understand if it required additional dependencies and a complex implementation, but I feel like the implementation in #1013 is small enough and clean enough that it shouldn’t add undue complexity to the project.

And supporting range requests has a whole bunch of applications beyond just getting the HTML <video> tag to work properly:

• Support reusable downloads using tools like curl -C and wget --continue - or the download UI in browsers like Chrome and Firefox
• Enable really neat tricks like the one described in Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages, where the range header is used to allow queries to be executed against giant SQLite databases without needing to download the entire database first

[abersheeran]

@abersheeran Do you think Starlette should support this? If not, should we add a note on the FileResponse section itself about baize.asgi.FileResponse, and close this as “Won’t do”?

I think Starlette could consider adding this feature. It is not complicated and requires little extra maintenance cost.