What is a blob URL and why it is used?

Question

I am having trouble with blob URLs.

I was searching for src of a video tag on YouTube and I found that the video src was like:

src="blob:https://video_url"

I opened the blob URL that was in src of the video, but it gave an error. I can't open the link, but it was working with the src tag. How is this possible?

I have a few questions:

• What is a blob URL?
• Why it is used?
• Can I make my own blob URL on a server?

Any additional details about blob URLs would be helpful as well.

Answer 1

Blob URLs (ref W3C, official name) or Object-URLs (ref. MDN and method name) are used with a Blob or a File object.

I opened the blob URL that was in src of the video, but it gave an error. I can't open the link, but it was working with the src tag. How is this possible?

Blob URLs can only be generated internally by the browser. URL.createObjectURL() will create a special reference to the Blob or File object which later can be released using URL.revokeObjectURL(). These URLs can only be used locally in the single instance of the browser and in the same session (ie. the life of the page/document).

What is a blob URL? Why it is used?

Blob URL/Object URL is a pseudo protocol to allow Blob and File objects to be used as URL source for things like images, download links for binary data and so forth.

For example, you can not hand an Image object raw byte-data as it would not know what to do with it. It requires for example images (which are binary data) to be loaded via URLs. This applies to anything that require an URL as source. Instead of uploading the binary data, then serve it back via an URL it is better to use an extra local step to be able to access the data directly without going via a server.

It is also a better alternative to Data-URI which are strings encoded as Base-64. The problem with Data-URI is that each char takes two bytes in JavaScript. On top of that a 33% is added due to the Base-64 encoding. Blobs are pure binary byte-arrays which does not have any significant overhead as Data-URI does, which makes them faster and smaller to handle.

Can I make my own blob URL on a server?

No, Blob URLs/Object URLs can only be made internally in the browser. You can make Blobs and get File object via the File Reader API, although BLOB just means Binary Large OBject and is stored as byte-arrays. A client can request the data to be sent as either ArrayBuffer or as a Blob. The server should send the data as pure binary data. Databases often uses Blob to describe binary objects as well, and in essence we are talking basically about byte-arrays.

Any additional details about blob URLs would be helpful as well.

You need to encapsulate the binary data as a BLOB object, then use URL.createObjectURL() to generate a local URL for it:

var blob = new Blob([arrayBufferWithPNG], {type: "image/png"}),
    url = URL.createObjectURL(blob),
    img = new Image();

img.onload = function() {
    URL.revokeObjectURL(this.src);     // clean-up memory
    document.body.appendChild(this);   // add image to DOM
}

img.src = url;                         // can now "stream" the bytes

Answer 2

The OP asks:

What is blob URL? Why is it used?

Blob is just byte sequence. Browsers recognize Blobs as byte streams. It is used to get byte stream from source. According to Mozilla's documentation

A Blob object represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. Blobs represent data that isn't necessarily in a JavaScript-native format. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system.

The OP asks:

Can i make my own blob url on a server?

Yes you can there are several ways to do so for example try http://php.net/manual/en/function.ibase-blob-echo.php

Read more here:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Blob
• http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/#dfn-Blob
• https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#urls

Answer 3

Another use case of blob urls is to load resources from the server, apply hacks and then tell the browser to interpret them.

One such example would be to load template files or even scss files.

Here is the scss example:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/sass.js/0.11.1/sass.sync.min.js"></script>

function loadCSS(text) {
    const head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]
    const style = document.createElement('link')
    const css = new Blob([text], {type: 'text/css'})
    style.href = window.URL.createObjectURL(css)
    style.type = 'text/css'
    style.rel = 'stylesheet'
    head.append(style)
}

fetch('/style.scss').then(res => res.text()).then(sass => {
  Sass.compile(sass, ({text}) => loadCSS(text))
})   

Now you could swap out Sass.compile for any kind of transformation function you like.

Blob urls keeps your DOM structure clean this way.

I'm sure by now you have your answers, so this is just one more thing you can do with it.

Answer 4

blob urls are used for showing files that the user uploaded, but they are many other purposes, like that it could be used for secure file showing, like how it is a little difficult to get a YouTube video as a video file without downloading an extension. But, they are probably more answers. My research is mostly just me using Inspect to try to get a YouTube video and an online article.

Answer 5

I have modified working solution to handle both the case.. when video is uploaded and when image is uploaded .. hope it will help some.

HTML

<input type="file" id="fileInput">
<div> duration: <span id='sp'></span><div>

Javascript

var fileEl = document.querySelector("input");

fileEl.onchange = function(e) {


    var file = e.target.files[0]; // selected file

    if (!file) {
        console.log("nothing here");
        return;
    }

    console.log(file);
    console.log('file.size-' + file.size);
    console.log('file.type-' + file.type);
    console.log('file.acutalName-' + file.name);

    let start = performance.now();

    var mime = file.type, // store mime for later
        rd = new FileReader(); // create a FileReader

    if (/video/.test(mime)) {

        rd.onload = function(e) { // when file has read:


            var blob = new Blob([e.target.result], {
                    type: mime
                }), // create a blob of buffer
                url = (URL || webkitURL).createObjectURL(blob), // create o-URL of blob
                video = document.createElement("video"); // create video element
            //console.log(blob);
            video.preload = "metadata"; // preload setting

            video.addEventListener("loadedmetadata", function() { // when enough data loads
                console.log('video.duration-' + video.duration);
                console.log('video.videoHeight-' + video.videoHeight);
                console.log('video.videoWidth-' + video.videoWidth);
                //document.querySelector("div")
                //  .innerHTML = "Duration: " + video.duration + "s" + " <br>Height: " + video.videoHeight; // show duration
                (URL || webkitURL).revokeObjectURL(url); // clean up

                console.log(start - performance.now());
                // ... continue from here ...

            });
            video.src = url; // start video load
        };
    } else if (/image/.test(mime)) {
        rd.onload = function(e) {

            var blob = new Blob([e.target.result], {
                    type: mime
                }),
                url = URL.createObjectURL(blob),
                img = new Image();

            img.onload = function() {
                console.log('iamge');
                console.dir('this.height-' + this.height);
                console.dir('this.width-' + this.width);
                URL.revokeObjectURL(this.src); // clean-up memory
                console.log(start - performance.now()); // add image to DOM
            }

            img.src = url;

        };
    }

    var chunk = file.slice(0, 1024 * 1024 * 10); // .5MB
    rd.readAsArrayBuffer(chunk); // read file object

};

jsFiddle Url

https://jsfiddle.net/PratapDessai/0sp3b159/

Answer 6

This Javascript function supports to show the difference between the Blob File API and the Data API to download a JSON file in the client browser:

/**
 * Save a text as file using HTML <a> temporary element and Blob
 * @author Loreto Parisi
 */

var saveAsFile = function(fileName, fileContents) {
    if (typeof(Blob) != 'undefined') { // Alternative 1: using Blob
        var textFileAsBlob = new Blob([fileContents], {type: 'text/plain'});
        var downloadLink = document.createElement("a");
        downloadLink.download = fileName;
        if (window.webkitURL != null) {
            downloadLink.href = window.webkitURL.createObjectURL(textFileAsBlob);
        } else {
            downloadLink.href = window.URL.createObjectURL(textFileAsBlob);
            downloadLink.onclick = document.body.removeChild(event.target);
            downloadLink.style.display = "none";
            document.body.appendChild(downloadLink);
        }
        downloadLink.click();
    } else { // Alternative 2: using Data
        var pp = document.createElement('a');
        pp.setAttribute('href', 'data:text/plain;charset=utf-8,' +
            encodeURIComponent(fileContents));
        pp.setAttribute('download', fileName);
        pp.onclick = document.body.removeChild(event.target);
        pp.click();
    }
} // saveAsFile

/* Example */
var jsonObject = {"name": "John", "age": 30, "car": null};
saveAsFile('out.json', JSON.stringify(jsonObject, null, 2));

The function is called like saveAsFile('out.json', jsonString);. It will create a ByteStream immediately recognized by the browser that will download the generated file directly using the File API URL.createObjectURL.

In the else, it is possible to see the same result obtained via the href element plus the Data API, but this has several limitations that the Blob API has not.