How do I return a video with Spring MVC so that it can be navigated using the html5 <video> tag?

A simple solution for handling non-static resources:

@SpringBootApplication
public class DemoApplication {

    private final static File MP4_FILE = new File("/home/ego/bbb_sunflower_1080p_60fps_normal.mp4");

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(DemoApplication.class, args);
    }

    @Controller
    final static class MyController {

        @Autowired
        private MyResourceHttpRequestHandler handler;

        // supports byte-range requests
        @GetMapping("/")
        public void home(
                HttpServletRequest request,
                HttpServletResponse response
        ) throws ServletException, IOException {

            request.setAttribute(MyResourceHttpRequestHandler.ATTR_FILE, MP4_FILE);
            handler.handleRequest(request, response);
        }

        // does not support byte-range requests
        @GetMapping(path = "/plain", produces = "video/mp4")
        public FileSystemResource plain() {

            return new FileSystemResource(MP4_FILE);
        }
    }

    @Component
    final static class MyResourceHttpRequestHandler extends ResourceHttpRequestHandler {

        private final static String ATTR_FILE = MyResourceHttpRequestHandler.class.getName() + ".file";

        @Override
        protected Resource getResource(HttpServletRequest request) throws IOException {

            final File file = (File) request.getAttribute(ATTR_FILE);
            return new FileSystemResource(file);
        }
    }
}

(inspired by Spring Boots LogFileMvcEndpoint and more or less equal to Paul-Warrens (@paul-warren) StoreByteRangeHttpRequestHandler which I found later on).

Hopefully this is something which Spring will support in the near future, see https://jira.spring.io/browse/SPR-13834 (please vote for it).

The HTTP resume download function might be your friend. I had the same problem before. After implementing http range the navigation in the video was possible:

http://balusc.blogspot.com/2009/02/fileservlet-supporting-resume-and.html

I know this is an old post but in case it is useful to anyone else out there asking the same/similar questions.

Now-a-days there are projects like Spring Content that natively support video streaming. All the code you would need for the simplest implementation would be:-

@StoreRestResource(path="videos")
public interface VideoStore extends Store<String> {}

And this would be enough to create a Java API and a set of REST endpoints that would allow you to PUT/POST, GET and DELETE streams of video. GET support byte ranges and will play properly in HTML5 video players and such like.