The media players with gstreamer backends that can play http streams (Totem and Exaile are the ones I'm testing) can seek an http stream of an mp3 file, but not ogg or flac files.

I am testing this on Ubuntu 10.04, with the gstreamer packages from the ubuntu repos (0.10.28).  Totem version 2.30.1, and exaile from the development repo.


The easiest way to test this is to launch a simple http server in a directory with .ogg/.flac/.mp3 files:

> python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

Then try to open location http://localhost:8080/<file> in Totem and try to seek.

The simple http server doesn't support the RANGE header so it can't seek (you see an exception), but it doesn't recieve seek requests for .ogg or .flac files, only for .mp3 files.


To test actual streaming, I used the spydaap python DAAP server launchpad.net/spydaap (bzr branch lp:spydaap)

You can use either Rhythmbox or Exaile to connect to the daap server and check the properties of a Track to get the URL, and then open that URL in any player that will play http streams.

Using this, I can seek in ogg/flac streams using VLC, but none of the gstreamer players I've tried.