Posted by Gary Hasler on 02/22/07 18:35

SPG wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Two questions for you all..
>
> Firstly, is there a way of streaming video using PHP? At the moment I just
> have a link to a video file and the whole thing downloads before playing
> which is a bit of a chore as the video file is pretty huge.
>
> Secondly, I want to restrict access to the video using a password. Can
> anyone think of a nice way of doing this? I thought about having the video
> embedded into a page and when the page loads it checks if a user is logged
> in and if not goes back to the login page, but that doesn't restict access
> to the actual video, IE: They can view source, find the Video link and
> simply copy it into a browser window...

Aside from PHP and the password issue, with most video types like .wmv,
..ram, etc, you can achieve a sort of pseudo-streaming effect without
having to go to a true streaming server by setting your mime and file
types properly so the web browser immediately passes the url off to the
video player app rather than trying to download the file. (For example,
with Realvideo types you can create a meta-file which only contains the
url of the actual video; so the browser downloads the (tiny) metafile
and gives it to Realplayer which then "streams" the actual video.)

There's also other media types which handle their own internal
streaming, like Flash.

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