You all know about restrictions that exist in shared environment, so with that in mind, please suggest me a php function or something with the help of which I could stream my videos and other files. I have a lot of videos on the server, unlimited bandwidth and disk space, but I am limited in ram and cpu.
3 Answers
Don't use php to stream the data. Use a header redirect to point to the URL of the actual file. This will offload the work onto the webserver which might run under a different user id and is better optimized for this task.
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Hmm, there is XMoov that acts as a "streaming server" but does not much more than serve a file byte by byte, with a few additional options and settings. It promises random access (i.e. arbitrary skipping within a video) but I haven't used it myself yet.
As a server administrator, though, I would frown on anybody using PHP to serve huge files like that because of the strain it puts on the server. I would generally not regard this to be a good idea, and rent a streaming server instead if at all possible. Use at your own risk.
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You can use a while loop to load bits of the file, and then sleep for some time, and then output more, and sleep... (that would be the only way to limit the CPU usage).
RAM shouldn't be a problem, as you will just dump parts of the file, so you don't need to load it into RAM.
