Get the real video URL from a url - php

Question

I'm trying to get the real file URL from a url that doesn't show up the real file name.
My url is like this http://video.premium.com/file/ee7bfec921cfbe16e6f08e282992b99670a00ca3/3
If I could get the real file url I could stream it directly online through a web player, but it needs .mp4 or other file format to play, just the url http://video.premium.com/file/ee7bfec921cfbe16e6f08e282992b99670a00ca3/3 doesnt work.
but when I open the URL using VLC media player, it works. doesn't work with online flash or other players..
Is this even possible? Anyway to do this?

Answer 1

With curl, use this: It follows the redirect until it finds the endpoint. In the included code I used goo.gl to shorten the url to a rando image. You will see the output is the original link (and it would output whatever number of redirects and their URLs), and the final redirect to the actual file. I think this is what you are looking for. I did not write this originally, but found it somewhere some time ago and reused it many times again with tweaking when needed. It seems to fit well in many places. Glad to pass it on. I think it might help to achieve what you are looking for.
<?php
function follow_redirect($url){
$redirect_url = null;
if(function_exists("curl_init")){
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
else{
$url_parts = parse_url($url);
$sock = fsockopen($url_parts['host'], (isset($url_parts['port']) ? (int)$url_parts['port'] : 80));
$request = "HEAD " . $url_parts['path'] . (isset($url_parts['query']) ? '?'.$url_parts['query'] : '') . " HTTP/1.1\r\n";
$request .= 'Host: ' . $url_parts['host'] . "\r\n";
$request .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
fwrite($sock, $request);
$response = fread($sock, 2048);
fclose($sock);
}
$header = "Location: ";
$pos = strpos($response, $header);
if($pos === false){
return false;
}
else{
$pos += strlen($header);
$redirect_url = substr($response, $pos, strpos($response, "\r\n", $pos)-$pos);
return $redirect_url;
}
}
$url = 'http://goo.gl/66VJB';
echo '<ol>';
while(($newurl = follow_redirect($url)) !== false){
echo '<li>', $url, '</li>';
$url = $newurl;
}
echo '</ol>';
echo '', $url, '';
?>
Output:
http://goo.gl/66VJB
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_XE0TDW07Noo/TOSVQXZtgAI/AAAAAAAAELo/aG80jZ7u_fo/s1600/aptitude_test.gif