Why is PHP interfering with my HTML5 MP4 video?

Question

I\'m writing a web app that serves H.264 encoded MP4 video. In Chrome and Safari, it does this via an HTML5 video tag.

In order to control access to these videos, th

Answer 1

Maybe. Try adding also the content length header:

header('Content-length: '.filesize($filename));

If this still doesn't work, check for any output before readfile (echo's or whitespace before ). Check also that you don't have whitespace after ?> or simply omit ?> (it's not mandatory if you have nothing after).

As Bruno mentioned, to support streaming, you also need to obey the Range header. Here's a simplified example that respects only the left bound:

if (empty($_SERVER["HTTP_RANGE"])) {
    //do your current stuff...
}
else { //violes rfc2616, which requires ignoring  the header if it's invalid
    preg_match("/^bytes=(\d+)-/i",$_SERVER["HTTP_RANGE"], $matches);
         $offset = (int) $matches[1];
    if ($offset < $filesize && $offset >= 0) {
        if (@fseek($fp, $offset, SEEK_SET) != 0)
            die("err");
        header("HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content");
        header("Content-Range: bytes $offset-".($filesize - 1)."/$filesize");
    }
    else {
        header("HTTP/1.1 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable");
        die();
    }
        //fread in loop here
}