PHP Built in web server and Range Requests with Safari - php

Question

I am working on this prototype and i have used the php built in web server, and all works perfect except handling a range request from Safari for a mp4 file. i have the following bootstrap code that gets executed for every incoming request for the php built in server
$extensions = array("html");
$path = parse_url($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], PHP_URL_PATH);
$ext = pathinfo($path, PATHINFO_EXTENSION);
if (!in_array($ext, $extensions)) {
return isRangeRequest();
}
require_once(__DIR__ . $path);
function isRangeRequest()
{
$filelength = filesize(__DIR__ . '/video/video.mp4');
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_RANGE'])) {
$ranges = explode(',', substr($_SERVER['HTTP_RANGE'], 6));
$parts = explode('-', $ranges[0]);
$start = $parts[0]; // If this is empty, this should be 0.
$end = $parts[1]; // If this is empty or greater than than filelength - 1, this should be filelength - 1.
if (intval($end) == 0) return false;
$readBytes = $end - $start + 1;
header('HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content');
header("Content-Length: " . $readBytes);
header('Content-Type: video/mp4');
header('Content-Range: bytes '.$start.'-'.$end.'/'.$filelength);
ini_set('memory_limit', "512M");
$fp = fopen(__DIR__ . '/video/video.mp4', 'rb');
if ($readBytes < 4096) {
print(fread($fp, $readBytes));
flush();
} else {
fpassthru($fp);
}
fclose($fp);
exit;
}
return false;
}
i have verified using tcpdump that the code above sends all the correct headers and i manage to get safari to start playing the video. however safari only is able to play the first few frames and then video stops.
here is response headers from a nginx server for the same request from safari
GET /video/video.mp4 HTTP/1.1
Host: job.local
Accept-Language: en-us
X-Playback-Session-Id: CD33782F-F257-4506-95C4-94ABD4E200CE
Cookie: PHPSESSID2=avrunqgk9rkb3941fe24q9asd6
Range: bytes=0-1
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/601.4.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.3 Safari/601.4.4
Referer: http://job.local/test.html
Accept-Encoding: identity
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Server: nginx/1.6.2 (Ubuntu)
Date: Fri, 27 May 2016 03:29:16 GMT
Content-Type: video/mp4
Content-Length: 2
Last-Modified: Thu, 26 May 2016 17:53:49 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "5747382d-8c6c509"
Expires: Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:55:55 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=315360000
Content-Range: bytes 0-1/147244297

GET /video/video.mp4 HTTP/1.1
Host: job.local
Accept-Language: en-us
X-Playback-Session-Id: CD33782F-F257-4506-95C4-94ABD4E200CE
Cookie: PHPSESSID2=avrunqgk9rkb3941fe24q9asd6
Range: bytes=0-147244296
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/601.4.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.3 Safari/601.4.4
Referer: http://job.local/test.html
Accept-Encoding: identity
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Server: nginx/1.6.2 (Ubuntu)
Date: Fri, 27 May 2016 03:29:16 GMT
Content-Type: video/mp4
Content-Length: 147244297
Last-Modified: Thu, 26 May 2016 17:53:49 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "5747382d-8c6c509"
Expires: Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:55:55 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=315360000
Content-Range: bytes 0-147244296/147244297
and here is the headers from the php built in server using the bootstrap code above
GET /video/video.mp4 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8005
Accept-Language: en-us
X-Playback-Session-Id: 740A36CB-C116-4F5E-A3BD-5B4B3A27B543
Range: bytes=0-1
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/601.4.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.3 Safari/601.4.4
Referer: http://localhost:8005/index.html
Accept-Encoding: identity
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Host: localhost:8005
Connection: close
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.30
Content-Length: 2
Content-Type: video/mp4
Content-Range: bytes 0-1/147244297
GET /video/video.mp4 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8005
Accept-Language: en-us
X-Playback-Session-Id: 740A36CB-C116-4F5E-A3BD-5B4B3A27B543
Range: bytes=0-147244296
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/601.4.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.3 Safari/601.4.4
Referer: http://localhost:8005/index.html
Accept-Encoding: identity
Connection: keep-alive
HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Host: localhost:8005
Connection: close
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.30
Content-Length: 147244297
Content-Type: video/mp4
Content-Range: bytes 0-147244296/147244297
apart from Connection: keep-alive not being supported by the built-in php server i don't see any other difference in the response. Do you see any potential issues here? The mp4 files is about 100MB and if i use a data-url instead of a file reference would that be ok?
This project is for a prototype that used only on a local machine, so there is no performance or security concerns and please avoid making such comments. the core concern is the reason why safari only plays the first few frames. (i also observed if the range request is not handled correctly safari will not even play the first few frames. So there is some other issue that maybe not so obvious.