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I have setup Owncloud and I want to use webdav to manage and access files. I prefer it over a samba share of a sftp user because of user rights and then I'll have .

It works accept streaming of video/audio. I asked it on the owncloud forum but they don't know for sure if it supports streaming.

Does webdav support streaming?
PS. And if it does can anybody point me in the direction to configure it with nginx.

janw
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I'm not sure about what you think of when you say "streaming".

WebDAV allows file transfers. It also allows partial file transfers (as specified in the HTTP standard).

Hence if your application wants to transfer media files to the WebDAV server, this is supported! And all "media streams" I can think of are - at the end - just files. (Expect data streams through special purpose protocols like RTP, Skype, etc)

Since WebDAV also supports partial reads and writes of files it's also possible to only transfer parts of a large media file (read: part of the stream).

The WebDAV implementation of OwnCloud is "sabre/dav". It's a very complete implementation of the WebDAV standard. On the other hand you need to use some client-side implementation to access OwnCloud over WebDAV - depending on the quality of this client implementation you should not run into any problems when transfering (parts of) large files...

gue
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  • So if I understand you correctly it should. It should allow me to make a webdav connection and open a video and skip to the 10th minute without downloading the whole file? Because I'm having problems with it. – janw Nov 19 '15 at 08:05
  • Yes - the WebDAV standard support this. But actually your WebDAV Client needs to be clever enough to use the feature of partial loading of files. – gue Nov 19 '15 at 08:12
  • If you have issues with this you might want to try out another client software... – gue Nov 19 '15 at 08:13
  • What client software do you use anyway? – gue Nov 19 '15 at 08:15
  • I tried windows mounting it as a drive. and [es file explorer](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.estrongs.android.pop&hl=nl) on both my android phone and tablet. I asked this to check if it should be supported in the first place. Eliminate possible problems one by one. You answered my specific question. But if you can help to zoom in on the actual problem I would be grateful. – janw Nov 19 '15 at 09:30
  • I think the overhead will be a problem. It costs more CPU power to send a partial file than with pure steaming protocols. And this overhead doubles if you need live transcoding as you would need to save the transcoding result, before being able to send it through WebDAV to the client. – mgutt Jul 26 '19 at 00:03