225882 - Ability to pass URLs to helper apps (for streaming) instead of downloading and then passing the entire file

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[bluppfisk]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

Well, FireBird just won't do what IE did so well: start playing a movie as soon
as the first kilobytes have arrived. Firebird will attempt to download the whole
file first before opening/playing it.

Try any mpg/wmv/avi/... file

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Ali Ebrahim]

MPEG and AVI aren't even streamable file formats, so even IE won't stream them.
WMV is a streaming file format, and I've seen Firebird successfully pass a WMV
URL to Windows Media Player and stream it before. The problem with WMV is that
for this to work, the correct MIME type needs to be set on the server side.

Comment 2

[Ali Ebrahim]

I don't think that this is a bug at all, as Firebird in this case is basically
performing to W3C spec. Marking as INVALID.

Comment 3

[alanjstr]

What media player?  What URL?  

Comment 4

[bluppfisk]

not true. IE will open the vid as soon as the first kilobytes have arrived. EVEN
an AVI format, which is just an extension for any video format, so it seems.

MediaPlayer 9 by the by

Comment 5

[alanjstr]

You have still not provided URLs for us to confirm.

Comment 6

[bluppfisk]

http://www.easycut.com/Cut_Steel.avi

Comment 7

[bluppfisk]

ftp://ftp.talonsoft.com/pub/movies/dogsofwar/dogsofwar-clip1.mpg

Comment 8

[alanjstr]

It sounds like Firebird is downloading the file and then calling the
application, instead of telling the external application to download it.  

Comment 9

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

The option could be to call the app directly, however this would be nontrivial
to implement, as we would need to identify whether the file can be played while
not fully downloaded, then instead of downloading and calling the app with the
local filename, calling the app with the remote filename and let the app handle that

not all apps are necessarily network-aware to this extent though

Comment 10

[Jesse Ruderman]

This is closely related to bug 137339.

Comment 11

[Ali Ebrahim]

Updating summary. This is most certainly not a bug, as I mentioned in comment 2.
This is an enhancement request. Marking as such.

RE comment 1, I may have actually opened up a playlist, which is why it appeared
to stream the files in WMP. Had I clicked on a media file directly, it would
have downloaded and then played.

I do think that its quite possible that this is a dupe of bug 137339, but I'm
not sure because we have forked download code. Ben, can you comment?

Comment 12

[Ali Ebrahim]

Moving to new File Handling component.

Comment 13

[Ali Ebrahim]

*** Bug 249437 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Ali Ebrahim]

Per bsmedberg, bumping this up to normal sev and cc'ing biesi.

Comment 15

[Lisa]

There's an extension now called "Download With" that may have code that would be
helpful to add this URL passing function to the firefox core.

Comment 16

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

yeah, this looks like the firefox version of bug 137339

probably depends on some backend work, marking dependency (frontend is forked,
so not marking as dup)

Comment 17

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

*** Bug 291884 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Stephan H. Wissel]

Attachment: UI part of the streaming/direct open support

Of course that UI part is only the tip of the iceberg. The fix goes deeper into
the mimeTypes.rdf

Comment 19

[Stephan H. Wissel]

One possible solution to store the configuration for helper applications is to
ammend the MimeTyped.rdf. The namespace NC
xmlns:NC="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#" would need a new attribute.
My suggestion would be NC:openFromURL="true" in the decription. A complete
description would look like this:
<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:handler:application/x-zip"
                   NC:alwaysAsk="true"
                   NC:openFromURL="true"
                   NC:saveToDisk="true">
Then the code from the "Download with merged into the core" could do the rest.
It would not only be streaming that benefits from a direct url support. Also
office productivity software that uses webDAV would need that function making FF
more attractive for corporate use

Comment 20

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 311954 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 22

[Matěj Cepl]

I can very well reproduce here with Firefox 2, and my reporter of the Fedora Rawhide bug (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=327681) reports to reproduce it with the latest FF3 build.

Steps to reproduce:
1. click on http://audio-ogg.ibiblio.org:8000/wcpe.ogg.m3u
2. select Rhythmbox as player for your stream

Actual result:
Rhythmbox thinks that this is reload of whole stream from the local file and so replaces all old radio stations with the new stream

Expected results:
Firefox is passing URL to Rhythmbox, which then handles it as it should

Comment 23

[Matěj Cepl]

Sorry, this should go probably to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137339

Comment 24

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

This will not block the final release of Firefox 3.

Comment 25

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 4 duplicates and 16 votes.
:Gijs, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 26

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.