Yes, indeed, I had worked on a small project of mine and needed a really efficient and cheap way to serve terabytes of data to a lot of users, fast. I was poor and young (15 years old).
I re-created (I haven't invented this, obviously) a way to split the video file into keyframe segments and mark down the start byte offsets of the keyframes, and then I could "virtually" split the file for streaming, so that a user wouldn't 1) buffer the whole file, 2) need to have the whole file to share to others (P2P in the browser), 3) need to restart the stream and sharing if the connection broke.
This could've obviously been done with HLS or DASH, but that required remuxing the files and keeping lots of them. I instead remuxed files into TS container, indexed all the files, made JSON manifests, and had a network of reverse proxy "CDN" servers on continents that would pull the files from a few central servers, cache the small virtual chunks, which were created by reading byte offsets from the file and serving it as a "file" with PHP.
In the end, the project collapsed due to non-technical issues, and me loosing interest and doing more legitimate and useful things. I then resold the technology a few times to some people who wanted the similar thing but wouldn't have the issues I had, then I moved on and forgot it all.
It's history, it's made my career in some way, at least from my side, it was innovative for it's time, and made me nerdy-cool in school, both with other kids and the school staff.
I re-created (I haven't invented this, obviously) a way to split the video file into keyframe segments and mark down the start byte offsets of the keyframes, and then I could "virtually" split the file for streaming, so that a user wouldn't 1) buffer the whole file, 2) need to have the whole file to share to others (P2P in the browser), 3) need to restart the stream and sharing if the connection broke.
This could've obviously been done with HLS or DASH, but that required remuxing the files and keeping lots of them. I instead remuxed files into TS container, indexed all the files, made JSON manifests, and had a network of reverse proxy "CDN" servers on continents that would pull the files from a few central servers, cache the small virtual chunks, which were created by reading byte offsets from the file and serving it as a "file" with PHP.
In the end, the project collapsed due to non-technical issues, and me loosing interest and doing more legitimate and useful things. I then resold the technology a few times to some people who wanted the similar thing but wouldn't have the issues I had, then I moved on and forgot it all.
It's history, it's made my career in some way, at least from my side, it was innovative for it's time, and made me nerdy-cool in school, both with other kids and the school staff.
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If someone wants to know a bit more, read this: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/21/9585984/browser-popcorn-... (It's cringe, I was young and stupid, LOL)