wyoung
commented
6 years ago The professional video broadcast/IPTV world still uses MPEG-TS far more than ISO Media (a.k.a. "MP4") and its predecessors. Despite MP4 appearing to take over the world, TS files are not going away any time soon.
Packaging H.264 and either AAC or AC3 in MPEG-TS is increasingly common in the broadcast world. Satellite TV commonly uses this, for example, as does Blu-ray. In this case, you can avoid doing a background transcode by doing a background remux instead, which is much quicker.
As a bonus, this may speed up operation on files accessed over a LAN link: remuxing over the LAN, operating on a local proxy, then generating the output from the local remuxed copy might be faster than operating on a remote MP4 file.
mifi
paravorheim
Since ffmpeg supports a lot of formats, and Chomium video player does not support as many, I think one possible solution would be to automatically losslessly reformat opened files to a supported format into a temp directory and play back that file instead. Should be relatively easy to implement, but it may be very slow and require a lot of space for big files.
Another possibility would be to serve a custom HTTP endpoint for the video player which automatically re-formats videos on demand, supporting HTTP seeking too, using ffmpeg. This is a bit more complicated unless someone knows an existing implementation of this.