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It's nice to see people thinking about processing input as a stream rather than waiting for the entire message to be received before doing anything.

If you start to think about input and output in web app as streams rather than buffered data, alot of neat possibilities arise for reducing latency.

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This is often true, but not always - some video formats put header data at the end of the file, not the beginning, so you can't just start encoding as bits come in. Or if you can, you're encoding blind.

Sure, but we think it's possible to "prepare" those videos on the client site before uploading.

Youtube have been doing this for a long time now, it's great watching a video being processed and "read" as it's uploaded, it's the even more user friendly step on from a progress bar, makes Youtube uploading more "fun".

Do you have any references for youtube doing this? Youtube is the example I always mention when it comes to long waiting times after an upload : ).

I don't believe YT transcodes during upload, since last I checked they are doing 2-pass encoding (its been awhile though).

However they do examine the buffer during an upload. Try uploading an MOV with bad edit points, they will warn you about A/V sync issues before the upload is complete. I assume they also abort uploads for invalid files.

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