Say i like to create my very own progressive streaming mechanicsm in Javascript because i'm finding the browser's built in streaming mechanism not fault-tollerant enough or i like to implement my own custom method over WebSocket. I would like to create a buffer which holds the already downloaded segments of a continous media file (say an arraybuffer or something like that). Is it possible to play this file even if it's not already downloaded from start-to-end?
My only idea was the Web Audio API which has a noteOn() function for preceisely timing the start of each segment. However i don't know how gapeless this would be. Also it introduces the problem that i have to know exactly where audio files can be cut safely on the server side so the next part can be decoded without any loss and gaps. E.g. mp3's bit reservoir stores audio data in neighbour audio frames even in CBR mode which makes things difficult.
What about creating a ScriptProcessorNode that feeds from your incoming buffers? The biggest issue is making sure that the segments are convertible to raw audio samples, but otherwise you could write a simple function in the onaudioprocess event handler that pulls in the next available buffer chunk and copies it into the node's output buffers. Since this would be a pull-on-demand mechanism, you wouldn't need to worry about timing segment playback.