There has been some talk of this around stackoverflow before, but nothing really answered this question from what I have seen.
I am trying to implement a streaming audio web application. Almost identical to what WFMU has done with their player (http://wfmu.org/html5/player.php).
All I have been able to figure out from their stream is they are piping the stream into PHP, don't know in what format, and then feeding this to jPlayer for HTML5 presentation to the client.
They have this working awesome, but I am just unsure how they are feeding the audio into PHP and what they are doing within their PHP to present it in an acceptable format for HTML5.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
It looks like the PHP script just echos out an audio file (http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DG/stream3.php).
There is no requirement to use PHP. For the client, all that matters is you send the appropriate content type, and actual content. In this case, audio/mpeg (MP3), or OGG for Firefox (which, isn't working for them right now, but it definitely can).
I suspect the reason that they are using PHP to relay the stream, is that they are using SHOUTcast as the streaming server. Doing some poking around, I found this: http://mp3stream.wfmu.org:8000/
Note that when you hit that URL in your browser, you get the basic information page. However, if you hit this with an audio player, you get the stream. The SHOUTcast server decides this based on the User-Agent string. If it contains "Mozilla" anywhere in the User-Agent, then it returns this page. If it doesn't, then it returns the stream. So, for an HTML5 audio player, it would use the browser's User-Agent (which contains Mozilla) and would be unable to access the stream. I suspect their PHP script is what gets around the problem.
The PHP script would use cURL, connect to the streaming server with its own User-Agent (can be anything, as long as it isn't "Mozilla"), and relay chunk by chunk to the browser that hit the PHP script. Piece of key-lime-pie.
Related
So I am new to Perl and web development but I was hoping to get some guidance on the following issue.
Server 1 is transcoding video for me and has an api endpoint for me to access. It will give me the file stream that I want to push to the web.
So for the sake of the problem lets say that it is accessed at:
server1:123\video_stream
Server2 is my web server and I want to have a page that lets us access this video stream file
server2:80\web_stream
I have seen in php you can do readfile("server1:123\video_stream) but the entire video_stream will be read into memory before being output to the page... or so I was told.
I have also seen in Perl that ffmpeg output can but routed through the open(DATA, $ffmpegProcess) then printing the buffer read from this stream to the web_stream page...
This all assumes that the header information about the attributes of the video are correct.
Would it be as simple as making a curl request to Server 1 and returning that stream output like I can already with the ffmpeg output?
I am not looking for complete solution, just some direction on the best and most correct way to do this. Maybe php and Perl are not the right tools to handle this at all?
ffserver seems like the better tool to use. It's part of the ffmpeg family.
PHP readfile() is a good way to do this. If you read the PHP manual page the discussion tells you how to deal with different possibilites of reading the file in chunks and dealing with memory issues.
I'm trying to stream MP4 files through Apache / Nginx using a PHP proxy for authentication. I've implemented byte-ranges to stream for iOS as outlined here: http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/content-delivery-mobile-devices. This works perfectly fine in Chrome and Safari but.... the really odd thing is that if I monitor the server requests to the php page, three of them occur per page load in a browser. Here's a screen shot of Chrome's inspector (going directly to the PHP proxy page):
As you can see, the first one gets canceled, the second remains pending, and the third works. Again, the file plays in the browser. I've tried alternate methods of reading the file (readfile, fgets, fread, etc) with the same results. What is causing these three requests and how can I get a single working request?
The first request is for the first range of bytes, preloading the file. The browser cancels the request once it has downloaded the specified amount.
The second one I'm not sure about...
The third one is when you actually start playing the media file, it requests and downloads the full thing.
Not sure whether this answers your question, but serving large binary files with PHP isn't the right thing to do.
It's better to let PHP handle authentication only and pass the file reference to the web server to serve, freeing up resources.
See also: Caching HTTP responses when they are dynamically created by PHP
It describes in more detail what I would recommend to do.
I have an HTML 5 website where I want to stream videos from a torrent server. I don't know which Linux torrent client to use. Can I use PHP as a torrent client?
Example:
<video src="downloder.php?file=movie.mp4"
downloader.php would then return an mp4 file from the .torrent file.
You can use #feross' fantastic library, webtorrent. This works in both Node.js and the browser.
HTML5/javascript can't do the bittorrent protocol. Java applets can, but few browsers support java applets out of the box these days. https://webtorrent.io/ is an alternate protocol that works in the browser. It can't communicate via the bittorrent protocol though, so only works with webtorrent trackers (and piers that speak webtorrent.)
I don't think it is even possible to stream from torrent. Files from torrent are separated into small chunks that are obtained unordered, when/if you will get them from other clients, when/if other clients decide to send them to you.
The torrent file doesn't contain any data to stream. Your PHP server would have to start receiving the torrent data from other peers (that is how torrents work).
MP4 is not a format that needs every byte to play - that is why QuickTime can start playing before completely downloading (hence streaming), but the bytes to play need to be at the start (or at the end, but in any case) - torrents do not 'load' in 'byte order'. As the above user says, torrents load data in chunks. You'd need at least the header.
It's just not realistic.
Is it possible to play the video (mp4) in real time using some flash player? What I mean by in real-time is that player would receive data on the fly, not from alredy saved file but e.g. php script (which sends appropriate content-type header) THAT IS DOWNLOADING AND 'ECHO-ing' THE FILE AT THE TIME PLAYER PLAYS IT - like e.g. some kind of live stream.
JW Player can play streaming video, and LongTail Video also has some good (practical) info on streaming in general:
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/search/google_cse_adv/streaming
Edit: Maybe I didn't read the question quite as well as i ought to before I answered, but here is info on so called pseudo streaming that can be implemented in PHP:
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-flash-v5/12534/video-delivery-http-pseudo-streaming
For instant playback using flash, you need to format your mp4 file to have the moov header box at the front of the file for playback to start right away. This can be done by the qt-faststart utility.
To allow for seeking in the file using flash (to a portion of the file not downloaded) you need to utilize pseudo streaming. (Since flash has disabled the partial bytes header). This needs to be implemented on the server side: http://h264.code-shop.com/trac as well as the flash side (both jwplayer and flowplayer supports this approach, and sends ?start=123 param on seek)
The other option is to use the html5 tag (but mp4 is only supported in a few browsers) - then you do not need the pseudostreaming backend.
You can use VLC media player from:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
After you successfully installed it, click on the menu Media->Open Network Stream and fill in the URL for the video.
I need to stream an flv file.
Streaming should look like live streaming,
and I there should be a way to change the target file.
Sorry for my poor English.
If by "streaming" you mean "showing a flash-video clip", flv-streaming isn't really streaming, but it's a normal file transfer, with the flash player starting playback even if the file isn't completely downloaded to the client. Time seeking is implemented in a standard HTTP way, with a file download offset - if you scroll the video halfway on the timeline and it hasn't downloaded yet, the current download is (most often) aborted, and restarted with an offset of filesize/2 bytes.
So, you could be fine with just using plain old readfile() and fixing the HTTP mime-type headers appropriately with header(). But, since you'd need seeking, you need to parse the HTTP request and instead of readfile(), use fpassthru(), seeking the right place, instead.
tl;dr: Avoid handling this on the PHP side, and let Apache (or the httpd of your choice) handle this instead.
I'm not quite sure what you're asking about, but if you have a bunch of media files and want to play them with a Youtube-esque media player on your website, I suggest checking out Flowplayer - It has an amazing Javascript API that lets you do all kinds of cool stuff to the player, including handling stuff like playlists and programmatically changing the current video.
I recently used it on a project with great results.