Streaming Content in ASP.NET Core

I've seen people working hard to stream content in ASP.NET Core. The content could be a video file or other large download. The hard work usually involves byte arrays and memory streams.

Some of this hard work was necessary in 1.0, but there are a number of features in 2.0 that make the extra work unnecessary.

With Static Files

The ASP.NET static files middleware will add ETag headers and can respond to partial range requests. The transfer is efficient.  Here's a cURL request for bytes 0 to 10 of a file named sample.mp4 that lives in the wwwroot folder.

$ curl -sD - -o /dev/null -H "Range: bytes=0-10" localhost:51957/sample.mp4

HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Content-Length: 11
Content-Type: video/mp4
Content-Range: bytes 0-10/10630899
Last-Modified: Wed, 14 May 2014 23:39:15 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "1cf6fcdb79b6573"

In the output you can see the 206 partial content response and Accept-Ranges header.

With File Results

There are many scenarios where serving files with static files middleware is problematic. One scenario is when the files require authorization checks. It is possible to enforce authorization checks on static files, but another approach is to use controller actions. Imagine serving up the following HTML:

<h2>File Stream</h2>
<video autoplay controls src="/stream/samplevideo"></video>

The video source points to the following controller action.

[Authorize(Policy = "viewerPolicy")]
public IActionResult SampleVideoStream()
{
    var path = Path.Combine(pathToVideos, "sample.mp4");
    return File(System.IO.File.OpenRead(path), "video/mp4");
}

FileStreamResult and VirtualFileResult also support Range headers with a 206 response, although they won't send ETags without using some additional code. In  many cases, however, the behavior is good enough to move forward without creating a lot of additional work.