RandomAccessFile over HTTP

Question

It's easy to open a connection to a remote asset using URL.openStream() which returns an InputStream. What about random access?

Answer 1

HTTP 1.1 allows retrieval of parts of a resource through use of Byte Ranges, but...

• servers are not required to support it
• you will incur extra overhead due extra request/response headers, (possibly) establishing extra network connections, etc.

Answer 2

True random access is not possible via http. You can simulate it though by passing a starting point as a paramater and return a stream that represents data from that position onwards.

For example this is how progressive HTTP download works (e.g. YouTube video seek).