Topic: How to know when a visitor is streaming a video

[patrick_here]

Hello,
I am hosting videos locally on my VPS (using video.js). I'm trying to figure out how I would know (from Apache) when a visitor is streaming a video ...when they start streaming, whether they are watching the entire video or just a few seconds of it ...etc. The Apache log is not helpful for this.

Does anyone know how I might get this information from Apache?

[tangent]

Apache logging is pretty flexible, so it should be possible to capture some of the information you're after.

However, you need to appreciate that the client browser will buffer video as it's downloading (unless it's downloading to a file rather than streaming to a user in realtime), so you're never going to get precise duration (start/finish) timings. It's also important to note that standard Apache log entries are written when the content transfer is complete (or the request gets interrupted by the client). So by default you won't get a log entry for when a request starts (but see later on).

Firstly, I'd suggest creating an additional custom log to record requests for your video files, and base this on the logio_module.

In your configuration file, enable (uncomment) the logio module, viz:

[patrick_here]

Yes, that explanation was very helpful. I configured it on two different VPS's. One thing I noticed was that (at least on one of them) the time that the log entry is generated for a particular video seems to be somewhat unpredictable. I would have expected that an initial entry would always be generated when the visitor clicks "Play" but on one of my VPS's this is not the case ...the initial entry may or may not be generated at the time the visitor clicks "Play". Is this expected behavior?

[tangent]

Ok, I'm not familiar with the functionality of video.js, but suspect client side requests will be dependent on a measure of browser caching. The best way to check what's going on is to use browser developer tools (Shift+Ctrl+I) and check the network requests.

Indeed, I've quickly done this using the sample code from the Video.js "getting started" page https://videojs.com/getting-started, and looking at the client side requests it becomes clear what's going on.

The code requests a chunk of the video file, 20MB in the case of my 2GB big.mp4 video file, and uses this to present a static image of the video behind the start button. It also means the browser has 20MB worth of video to play when the user presses the start button.

So depending on the size of the video (and the browser cache), you may not see a further transfer when the user presses the start button. Moreover, subsequent transfers will only start once the browser code decides it needs to buffer further video.

I suspect the only way you're going to capture the start button being pressed would by coding in some form of specific (dummy) request at that point. There may be some Video.js option that may help you hook this event - https://videojs.com/guides/options

In any event, it would seem your problem isn't down to Apache functionality.

[patrick_here]