Videos take 1-2s to start because the IPFS gateway has no range support

[Bielcx]

Problem

Opening the app and going to the Videos tab, or opening a clip from a profile grid, takes a visible moment before anything plays. It is the first impression of the app's main surface, and it is not the phone or the connection — it is the gateway.

What was measured

While investigating #23, ipfs.skatehive.app showed:

• TTFB of 1.0–1.8s before the first byte of a video.
• No Content-Length header.
• Range requests ignored — the response is not partial.

That last pair is what hurts most. Without range support the player cannot ask for just the opening of the file to start rendering; it waits on a stream whose size it does not know. Every clip pays the full latency before the first frame, every time it is not warm in cache.

What the app already does about it

Nothing left, on the app side, that is cheap:

• Profile grid tiles render the poster frame instead of mounting a player (fix(create): put uploaded media in the snap's json_metadata #26, perf(profile): poster-first video grid, and keep the viewer's poster up while buffering #27), which is why the grid is fast now — a ~32KB JPEG instead of a multi-megabyte fetch.
• The immersive viewer and the Videos tab hold that poster up until onFirstFrameRender, so the wait shows a picture rather than a black rectangle.

But the Videos tab and the viewer have to fetch the actual video, and there the gateway is the floor.

What would actually fix it

Server side, roughly in order of impact:

1. Support HTTP Range on video responses, so players can start on the first chunk.
2. Send Content-Length.
3. Put a CDN in front of the gateway so a popular clip is not re-fetched from IPFS per viewer.

Notes

• This is infrastructure, not the mobile app — filed here because it is where the symptom is visible. Move it to the API/infra repo if that is the better home.
• Worth re-measuring before acting: the numbers above are from the Profile grid mounts a native video player per tile — slow video loading #23 investigation and should be confirmed as still current.

Suggested label: performance, infra