www.makemkv.com

Attempting to seek in mplayer results in it reporting "Stream is not seekable" and the program hangs.

I noticed this too. It is a limitation of mplayer. The VLC program can seek in streams. Also, XBMC has limited seeking. Specifically, it can resume at the point you last stopped in a stream. I wrote a Perl script to launch makemkvcon in streaming mode that puts each blu-ray disc on a different port to take full advantage of the resume feature in XBMC.

Since some clients could seek, I concluded that the problem was client-side, not server-side.

I couldn't say for sure obviously but what with MakeMKV being beta, I'd guess maybe there is something slightly broken with the stream (that VLC manages to cope with that mplayer doesn't)

I use mplayer for everything and would be much more inclined to purchase MakeMKV if it works with mplayer than just VLC.

Since both VLC and XBMC are able to do random seeking on MakeMKV streams, I think the problem with mplayer + MakeMKV is with the mplayer client. The limitation in XMBC is with the UI, not with the seeking. Also, the entire stream is implemented through a socket. ISTM that a client or server either implements seeking or it doesn't. Clearly MakeMKV implements seeking. It is incredibly unlikely that any sort of work-around would be required. What could the problem be? They misspelled the seek commands? It is even more unlikely that both VLC and XBMC both implemented a MakeMKV specific work-around.

You had also mentioned previously that mplayer crashes when you try to seek on a MakeMKV stream. This is clearly a problem with mplayer. The bluray support in mplayer is rather new and it has been buggy. I can easily believe it is not yet feature-complete.

Whether you buy MakeMKV or not is none of my business.

It may well be an issue with mplayer but definitely something I think the makemkv developers need to investigate also.

I've updated to the svn versions of mplayer, smplayer, and ffmeg (on Gentoo). Smplayer now seems to have limited seeking when using vdpau. The "skip forward +10 seconds" seems to work. I can't skip forward more than that and I can skip backward at all.

I can also now fast-forward in XMBC (but not rewind, it seems). Fast-forward x2 is also working in Smplayer..

MakeMKV streaming server is just an ordinary web server that serves decrypted m2ts files. As long as player can seek and restart http streams it should work.

I've got the Cherokee web server installed. You can enable streaming with a couple of clicks. I did this and replicated the streaming/non-streaming results seen with the MakeMKV streaming server. MPlayer and SMPlayer don't seek while VLC does. QED.

You could probably install Cherokee and try this yourself.

Just received a response from the mplayer developers

0 - CONTENT-LENGTH: 15882326856
1 - CONTENT-TYPE: video/vnd.dlna.mpeg-tts
2 - DATE: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:13:12 GMT
3 - LAST-MODIFIED: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:09:22 GMT
4 - SERVER: MakeMKV v1.6.3 linux(x64-release), UPnP/1.0, Portable SDK for UPnP devices/1.6.6
5 - X-User-Agent: redsonic

The server is broken, it is is claiming it does not support
downloading arbitrary ranges (no Accept-Ranges header) and
thus seeking just is not possible.
Any program that can do seeking with this will be horribly
broken when trying to use it with a web-server that really
does not support ranges.
There is some tricks like just trying to send a ranges header
anyway and see if the server accepts it, but I somewhat feel
that asking for a webserver implementation to be at least
half-correct is not asking too much (though the custom YouTube
web-server does the same crap).

Can this be addressed?