Are you playing an MPEG-4 file? If so, the multiple requests are necessary to read the various parts of the metadata which are quite inconveniently scattered around at different places in the MPEG-4 container. If you look at the byte-range requests you should see that it's seeking around to different parts of the file.

--Mark

I've seen certain MP4 files where the "thrashing" increases the further into the video you go until it gets to the point of overloading the rather low-power web server I have on my NAS and crashes it 😞 . If yous guys are actually wanting to work on this issue I could turn on logging and attempt to see what's really going on for ya 🙂 . I'm guessing it is re-reading some parts of the file over and over again rather than caching it ?

We require that the web server hosting the video content supports range requests. My guess is that your NAS server does not.

--Kevin