I'm building a page (using video.js, should it matter) that holds players for a reasonably large number of videos — click a button on a thumbnail of the image and a modal player opens up, playing the video. Works fine; no big deal. My server is Apache 2.2.15, fwiw.
The question: when I look at my server logs, I see entries for each of the videos with an HTTP code of 206 (partial content), such as:
GET /videos/a_video.mp4 HTTP/1.1" 206 1130496 "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_1) AppleWebKit/537.73.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.1 Safari/537.73.11"
I'm not sure what these entries mean, exactly. When this page loaded, was 1.1 MB of stuff really pushed over the network to the client, or is this just information that the client is meant to use when/if the file is really requested by the user? Dumping all this stuff onto the user/client would be a pretty piggish thing to do to somebody's bandwidth (let along my site's), especially on a mobile connection. (Based on some additional log analysis, it looks like those bits are really getting pushed, but checking this with other more knowledgeable people surely seems like the right thing to do…)
Best Answer
This looks perfectly normal to me. Most video (and even audio!) players request small chunks of the file at a time, and then request more later, as the user actually plays the video. 206 is only sent when the user-agent specifically requests a specific range of the file, rather than the entire file.