What HTTP headers do I need to stream an ASF file? - php

I have a simple PHP script that will either serve up a streaming ASF file or not, depending on whether you're logged in and have access to the file. It basically does this:
<?php
header('Content-Type: video/x-ms-asf');
header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="file.asf"');
readfile('file.asf');
?>
This already works fine in Firefox; when you navigate to this file it starts the video streaming right away. But Internet Explorer is a different story. When I go to this link in IE, it consistently tries to download the file as if it were an attachment rather than streaming it in the browser. What I am missing that IE's getting hung up on?

I don't think you need to add the Content-Disposition. Did you try removing it?

It look like that your IE or Media Player isn't correctly configured. Check this link link text for more details.

From your description, it sounds like your IE is configured to save a .asf file rather than stream it. Perhaps you can try opening a similar file on your local drive in IE to check whether it's configured to stream it.

Related

PHP output internal server file?

On my server I have a directory with music files, generally in .mp3 format. I'm writing a web application to search for and play these tracks.
All the files are stored, with their absolute server path, artist, album and title info in a MySQL database.
What I want to do is have a PHP file that "outputs" an mp3 file on the server that would normally be inaccessible from the web. So, this is what I want to achieve:
client requests play.php?id=10
PHP gets absolute server path from MySQL database where ID = 10
PHP outputs the file (which would really be at e.g. '/home/user/files/no_web/mp3/Thing.mp3')
To the client, it looks like there is an mp3 file called http://myserver.com/play.php?id=10 and it starts to play.
I'm sure this sort of thing is possible, just not sure how. Thanks in advance :)
You need to send correct content-type header and then just output the file:
header('Content-type: audio/mpeg3');
readfile('filename.mp3');
For reading the file and sending it, you can use the readfile function.
For setting the mime-type, so the browser actually knows what type of file is sent by the webserver, use the header function like:
header('Content-Type: audio/mpeg');
Additionally, you may also want to set the Content-Length HTTP header.
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($filepath) );
If all you're trying to do is let the user download the mp3, just use the readfile command which will read the mp3 file and pass it along to the client. However you need to make sure to set the mime-type correctly.

Download KML File Instead of View in Browser

I am working on a project which creates a KML File (just like an XML file, but used for Google Earth). Whats interesting is when I link to the newly created file, on my local machine, running XAMPP, the file is downloaded automatically, however when I move it to my web server (Linux, Fedora 8 on EC2) the link just loads the KML file in the browser as if it was an HTML file.
How can I force it to download the file instead of viewing it in the browser?
Here's how to link is displayed with PHP,
echo "<a href='$currentTime.kml'><img heigth=\"15px\" width=\"13px\" src=\"images/KML_Icon.gif\" /> Download</a>";
Any advice would help, thanks!
What you need to do is to specify the headers so the Browser knows what to do with the information that you are sending. So before you send anything to the browser you will need to specify the headers.
If you are linking to a specific file, then you will have to create a little "download manager" that will do this for you.
<?
header('Content-disposition: attachment; filename=the-name-you-want-them-to-see-in-their-download.pdf');
header('Content-type: text/xml'); //Since KML files are based on XML this is probably the best Content type to send to the user.
readfile('the-file-you-want-to-present')
?>
That should do it.
Thank you for your guys' input, but Oded had the answer regarding the mime types.
On the server there's a file called mime.types which didn't contain the mime type for a KML file, I added in
application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml
And it now downloads the file instead of loading it in the browser, by the way apache needs to be restarted once you have made the changes.
I had this a long while ago, I used a method similar to this:
http://webdesign.about.com/od/php/ht/force_download.htm

How to use google docs viewer for embedding ppt files on a webpage, if the file is served by a php script?

I've uploaded an MS powerpoint file to my server, and I'm trying to use Google Docs viewer (http://docs.google.com/viewer) to display it on a webpage.
The file is available here:
http://elgg.wamped.org/test.ppt
If I invoke the docs viewer with the above URL, it is working as expected, see:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Felgg.wamped.org%2Ftest.ppt
But when I'm trying to serve the same file through a very simple php script to the viewer, it fails rendering with the not too helpful error message: "Sorry, we are unable to generate a view of the document at this time", see:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Felgg.wamped.org%2Freadfile.php
The script that serves the file is as follows:
<?php
header('Content-type: application/vnd.ms-powerpoint');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="test.ppt"');
readfile('test.ppt');
?>
I've tried playing around with various header fields like Pragma and Cache-Control, but nothing helped. I also tried slicing the output file and echoing in chunks, that also did not do any good. Checked the apache log on the server, checked the response headers, everything seems fine to me.
Any ideas what am I doing wrong here?
EDIT: Although I haven't found a solution to this issue, I stumbled upon a site that does the same (or seems to do more than that, actually) as Google Docs Viewer. http://embedit.in has support for a wide range of file types, has an API, and does the job nicely, so I'll just probably go with that one. However, out of curiousity, I'd still like to know what is wrong with the piece of code below. So any suggestions are more than welcome.
Have you tried naming the php file with a .ppt file extension instead of .php? Whether or not your server will process php code in a file that doesn't have a .php file extension is another problem. But Google Docs may simply say NO to loading any file with a .php extension on it.
Capitalize the T in Content-Type. I also provided the Content-Length header. My filehandler works now.
It looks like you might be missing some headers. You might also want to see if the file is in the same directory as readfile.php, because google might store each file on a remote server.

PHP: prompting download from ftp?

hy guys,
i really need your help. i've succesfully connected to ftp server via php.
i'm listing all files that are on the server. if i click a file the browser should prompt a download window to download the file.
i've absolutely no idea how to do that. which method am i going to use. ftp_get kind of confuses me. it says i have to declare a local_file as well. i just want a file on the server to download to my harddrive.
how can i do that?
regards matt
The remote file has to first be downloaded to your server before you can send it to the user. It's invisible to the user, but you don't have a choice. PHP won't let the browser talk directly to the FTP server.
Create a separate php script that calls ftp_get for a specific file, stores it temporarily to your server to allow the user to download it.
Something like:
<?php
//assume the page was called like download.php?filename=downloaded.pdf
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$_GET['filename'].'"');
$tempFile = 'temp'.rand();
ftp_get($ftp, $tempFile, $_GET['filename'], FTP_BINARY);
readfile($tempFile);
You may add code to delete the tempFile too.
If you provide a link to a file that can't be read by the browser (such as a php file, audio, video, etc.) it will ask you to download the file.
The other way is to use PHP headers on a page and print out the page, and link to that page. http://www.ryboe.com/tutorials/php-headers-force-download

Renaming File on another server as user downloads it [2] - using PHP

I have asked this question today already but this time I want to know if I can achieve this via PHP since Javascript wasn't up to it.
I have a link to a file on another server. If i provide this link to my users the headers are pushed out to download that file from that server.
Is there a way for me to capture those headers and file and redirect the download to the user? I would like to do this so that I can change the filename of the download since it is
always 'file.zip'.
Is this possible with PHP?
Thank you for any help.
You can download the file to your server using curl and serve it correctly(with a Content-Disposition header). As long as you are using HTTP, there's no way to send just the header and let another server stream the content directly to the client.
You could do this, and you can do it in several ways.
1) (simple) copy the file to your server, and rename it. Point your download links to this copy.
2) (harder) Create a stub php file, called , read the file from the remote server within php, and stream the content to the script output. This will need you to set appropriate headers, etc. as well as setting up your webserver to parse through PHP.
Seriously, I'd go with option 1. (assumes you have a legal right to serve the content, etc.)
Maybe you can use a script similar to the following one:
<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.example.com/the_path/file.zip");
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="alternate_filename.zip"');
exit();
?>

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