Servlet for writing Video bytes to response

Question

Hi there,
Thanks to all who read this.
I have developed an J2EE application that allows people to watch video and can see the application using mobile devices such as the iPhone.
Videos for the iPhone are currently encoded in MP4 format and have been tested to work. When someone hits a video URL we have a Video servlet thats writes the bytes to the response. The code is given below:
private void doGetAndPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp)
     // Get the URL up to the ? in the location
     logger.debug("doGetAndPost(HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse) - BEGIN");
     String requestURI = req.getRequestURI();
     String [] parts = requestURI.split("/");
     // Our filename is always the last item in our URI
     String filename = parts[parts.length-1];
     String trueFilePath  = Manager.getProperty(Manager.CLIP_DIRECTORY_KEY )  +"/"+  filename;
     logger.debug("doGetAndPost(HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse) - Getting file: "  +trueFilePath );
     String userAgent = req.getHeader("User-Agent").toLowerCase();
     String mimeType = "application/x-download";
     // if the user is browsing from a Blackberry we need to forward them to
     // the mobile view of things
     // All mobile views are a concatenation of the current views plus mobile such 'done' becomes 'doneMobile'
     if( userAgent.indexOf("blackberry") != - 1 || userAgent.indexOf("iphone") != - 1)
          mimeType="video/mp4";+
     else
            resp.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename="+  filename );
     try
          // Set the response for our download
          File file = new File(trueFilePath);
          int fileSize = (int)file.length();
          FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream( file );
          resp.setContentType(mimeType);
          // Set the file size of the download....
          resp.addIntHeader("Content-Length", fileSize );
          resp.flushBuffer();
          OutputStream os = resp.getOutputStream();
          //write to out output stream
          while(true)
                    int bytedata = fis.read();
                    if (bytedata == -1)
                         break;
                    os.write(bytedata);
          // flush and close streams.....
          fis.close();
          os.flush();
          os.close();
     catch (FileNotFoundException e)
          logger.debug("doGetAndPost(HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse) - Unable to find file: " + trueFilePath, e );
     catch (IOException e)
          logger.debug("doGetAndPost(HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse) - Unable to get response output stream", e );
     logger.debug("doGetAndPost(HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse) - END");
}This implementation is working fine for desktop browsers but when running it on a mobile device I hit a BrokenPipe SocketException.
What I have noticed is that with mobile devices the servlet gets hit twice - seemingly once as the users selects the link and then the browser decides that it doesn't know what to do with that MIME type then it initialises its own internal media player then the servlet gets hit again to try and play the video.
The broken pipe error seems to occur after the browser has decided it doesn't now how to handle the MIME type and thus any subsequent writes to the response/connection file.
Has anyone experienced anything similar? Can anyone point out where I am going wrong?
Many thanks in advance,
Jimbobegg

Answer 1

Besides the error message you log does it actually work in the mobile device or not?
If it's working, then it works. The broken pipe simply means that the client is killing the socket unexpectedly. So...
As an aside wrap a buffered stream around your file in. Reading a file byte by byte is needless and painful and slow.