Accept Ranges: bytes

How easy would it be to add support for video range requests? If it’s non-trivial then not to worry, thought I’d ask.
I am writing something that plays videos in HTML5 and noticed that url#t=[start_time][,end_time] wasn’t working, and then realised that sirv didn’t have Accept Ranges: bytes for the video content request although it was serving the file ok. Would be nice to have the feature but if it’s not within the scope of this project then fair enough. Thank you.

[subz390]

Ok so here’s a summary: servers and browsers aren’t required to do anything with range requests, but when they do then either side can do something about it.
So due to this policy when requesting a video directly in the browser window one can expect inconsistent results.
However range requests should work as expected in a typical use case, for example when embedding a video in an HTML Video element . I’ve tested Sirv with Chrome and Firefox and in both cases everything works as expected. I’m happy to leave it there.

Here’s the RFC for reference;

An origin server that supports byte-range requests for a given target resource MAY send Accept-Ranges: bytes to indicate what range units are supported. A client MAY generate range requests without having received this header field for the resource involved. RFC 7233 HTTP/1.1 Range Requests

[paulocoghi]

In other words, despite the Accept-Ranges header isn’t required before sending data, in some cases the browser may understand that the web server doesn’t support ranges when this header isn’t present.

For this issue, Firefox may be understanding that Sirv doesn’t support ranges on direct access, because it isn’t even trying to test a range request.

To solve this, I believe that sirv would have to always send the Accept-Ranges header on the first response to ensure to the browser that it supports it, but this could potentially reduce the overall performance of Sirv.