Installing the QTSSRawFileModule

To use QTSSRawFileModule, add it to your QTSSModules folder, and restart the QuickTime Streaming Server.

What does QTSSRawFileModule do?

Users of QTSSRawFileModule should be familiar with the RTSP protocol. This protocol is documented as RFC 2326. http://www.landfield.com/rfcs/rfc2236.html

When an RTSP client issues a DESCRIBE, the QTSSRawFileModule will examine the request URL. If the suffix of the filename in the URL is ".raw", the module will look for a file in the location specified by the URL. If this file exists, the module will return the entire contents of the file to the client as the RTSP response. QTSSRawFileModule will not prepend RTSP headers to the response, so the "Raw File" itself must include headers.

For example:

Request URL: rtsp://streaming.site.com/subdir/rawfile.raw
QTSSRawFileModule looks for: <movies directory>/subdir/rawfile.raw

If there is a file at that location, QTSSRawFileModule will send its contents to the client as the RTSP response.

QTSSRawFileModule also allows you to override default server behavior for URLs that don't have a ".raw" suffix. On every DESCRIBE sent to the server, QTSSRawFileModule appends a ".raw" to the end of the URL, no matter what is in the URL. If it finds a file at that location, it will return the contents of the file to the client as the RTSP response.

For example:

Request URL: rtsp://streaming.site.com/dir/example.mov
QTSSRawFileModule looks for: <movies directory>/dir/example.mov.raw

If there is a file at that location, QTSSRawFileModule will send its contents to the client as the RTSP response.

How to use QTSSRawFileModule to send redirects:

A redirect is a special type of RTSP response that tells the client to reissue the same request with a different URL. The new URL is specified in the "Location" header of the redirect response. This is extremely handy if content gets moved around on a site, and the administrator doesn't want the old links to break.

The following is a sample redirect response:

RTSP/1.0 302 Found
CSeq: 1
Server: QTSS/2.0
Location: rtsp://streaming.site.com/new/newexample.mov

To have QTSSRawFileModule issue a redirect, place the contents of the above redirect response into a text file, give it a name with a .raw suffix, and place it somewhere inside your media folder.

For example, if it is called "example.mov.raw", and placed directly inside the media folder, when the client issues a DESCRIBE request for rtsp://streaming.site.com/example.mov

The QTSSRawFileModule will redirect the client to the new URL, specified in the location header.

The client will immediately send a DESCRIBE to the new URL.