Best way to check if URL is a video file in PHP? - php

Question

I'm trying to find a way to be (almost) sure that an URL is real video file.
I've of course check get_headers to check if URL exist and header content type :
function get_http_response_code($theURL)
{
$headers = get_headers($theURL);
return substr($headers[0], 9, 3);
}
function isURLExists($url)
{
if(intval(get_http_response_code($url)) < 400)
{
return true;
}
return false;
}
function isFileVideo($url)
{
$headers = get_headers( $url );
$video_exist = implode(',',$headers);
if (strpos($video_exist, 'video') !== false)
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
Maybe i answer to myself, but maybe there are other more robust solution ( for video type mainly) .
Don't know if it's possible, but could i just download the file metadatas first and return the file related to this test ?
Thanks a lot !

Answer 1

Of course you can't be sure, but the best practice is to check the first bytes of the file and identify the MIME type based on this information.
An example of it as to find in this Q & A: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8225754/2797243

Answer 2

You can try this code,
<?php
function getUrlMimeType($url) {
$buffer = file_get_contents($url);
$finfo = new finfo(FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE);
return $finfo->buffer($buffer);
}
?>
You need to enable the extension on your PHP.ini
php_fileinfo.dll
If you want to download some portion of file use,
$filename = $url;
$portion=8192; // if you want upto 8192 byte to read
$handle = fopen($filename, "rb");
$contents = fread($handle, $portion);
fclose($handle);
If you want to take some portion of $url from inside file use,
$filename = $url;
$from=10000; // if you want to read file from 1000 byte
$to=9999; //if you want to read up to 999 9byte
$handle = fopen($filename, "rb");
$skip= fread($handle, $from);
$contents = fread($handle, $to);
fclose($handle);
Then you can cheque mime type of file.
thanks