Streaming Video with Golang Fiber: A Practical Tutorial

Streaming video is a common requirement for modern web applications, especially those dealing with multimedia content.

In this article, we’ll explore how to implement video streaming using the Fiber web framework in the Go programming language. Fiber is known for its speed and simplicity, making it an excellent choice for building high-performance web applications.

Streaming Video with Fiber: A Practical Tutorial

Setting Up the Project

Let’s start with setting up the project.

go mod init fiber-streaming-app

then import the go fiber package

go get -u github.com/gofiber/fiber/v2

and the directory structure

Now, let’s create a basic Fiber application

Serve the video file with SendFile method

Now, let’s implement the streamVideo function. We'll use Fiber's SendFile method to simplify the process

SendFile is a function in the Golang Fiber web framework that transfers a file from a given path to the client. It is used to serve static files such as images, videos, and documents.

The SendFile function is similar to the Send function, but it is optimized for serving large files.

Implement the Front-end script

Let’s wrote the html which serve the stream endpoint

Now you can run the app by using go run main.go and you can see the video by accessing the url http://localhost:3000

Enhancing Video Streaming with Range Requests

To support video streaming with range requests (allowing users to seek within the video), we can implement a more advanced streamVideo function

There should be HTTP response headers that are crucial for correctly handling partial content (range requests) in video streaming.

• Content-Range : Header specifies which part of the entire content is included in the current response. It’s essential for range requests.
  Content-Range: bytes 0-499/10000
• Content-Length : Header indicates the size of the content in the current response. For range requests, it should represent the size of the range being served.
  Content-Length: 500
• Content-Type : Header specifies the media type of the content. In the context of video streaming, it tells the client that it’s receiving video content and provides information about the video format.
  Content-Type: video/mp4
• Accept-Ranges : Header indicates whether the server supports range requests. Setting it to bytes means that the server can handle byte-range requests.
  Accept-Ranges: bytes
• Status Code 206 (Partial Content): status code (206) informs the client that the server is returning only a portion of the requested content (partial content) in response to a range request.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve explored how to implement video streaming using the Fiber web framework in Go. Fiber’s simplicity and performance make it a great choice for building web applications, especially those involving multimedia content.

I hope this article helps. Thank you so much for reading. :)

You can find the complete source code for this example on GitHub and read more Fiber.

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happy coding