Live streaming through MP4

Question

I am working on an online TV service. One of the goals is for the video to be played without any additional browser plug-ins (except for Flash).

I decided to use MP4

Answer 1

You may use fragmented MP4. A fragmented MP4 file is built a follows:

moov [moof mdat]+

The moov box then only contains basic information about the tracks (how many, their type , codec initialization and so on) but no information about the samples in the track. The information about sample locations and sample sizes is in the moof box, each moof box is followed by a mdat that contains the samples as described in the preceding moof box. Typically one would choose the length of a (moof, mdat)-pair to be around 2,4 or 8 seconds (there is no specification on that but these values seem to be reasonable for most usecases).

This is a way to construct a neverending MP4 stream.