Recently I used a chrome extension to record screen and got the output as a webm file. Although I was happy that I got an extension to record my long meetings, the output webm file was not seekable. Meaning I cannot play the video at a specific point of the video. A long video without seeking controls is not much useful right? Solution – convert the webm file to another format like mp4 or make it a seekable webm video file. I choose the second option!
What is a webm file?
If you are a developer or a tech savvy person, you would have heard about the webp image files, webm are to that for videos.
Webm is a audio video file, that has native support in modern browsers. It is optimized for web and has low computational footprint. It is also supported in various players.
Why does the file go non seekable?
May be the video that you had was recorded real-time or in real time mode. In my case my screen recording extension was actually recording real-time. So they don’t have the metadata or duration as the duration is unknown by the time the header is written.
How to convert a non seekable webm file to a seekable webm video file?
If you had already used npm packages, this is simple as running a couple of commands.
You have the video file that is non real-time, you can use a relevant package like ts-ebml to add the metadata, duration and other information and convert a non seekable file to a seekable webm video file.
Run the below commands
npm i ts-embl
ts-ebml -s video.webm | cat > seekable-video.webm
And that is it, you have now converted your video into seekable one.
this is not working on windows 10
i needed complete guide to do that
I have tried to use this method, But my files have size more than 2GB due to which it is throwing an error, Would like to know if there is a work around or an alternative for this