Receiving Data from a Streaming

Question

I’m having a little problem, and I’d like your help. Recently I had a doubt and I started researching about but found nothing, I noticed that the video streaming services uses a server "Wowza" and for that I wanted to receive streaming and be able to replicate using php an example is the url below

http://live-hls.rtvcm.stream.flumotion.com:80/rtvcm/hls-multi/main.m3u8

I used this code to try to connect but was giving error

<?php
$fp = fsockopen("http://live-hls.rtvcm.stream.flumotion.com:80/rtvcm/hls-multi/main.m3u8", 80, $errno, $errstr);

fwrite($fp, "GET request HTTP/1.1\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n");

while (!feof($fp)) {
        echo fgets($fp, 1024);
}
    fclose($fp);
?>

I don’t know if it’s possible, I tried using socket but I couldn’t, could someone help me with that? I’m sorry if the url is not appropriate but I needed to quote a url for testing.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Daniel, I know that question was a long time ago, but for historical purposes and other people with similar doubts follow my answer.

A HLS stream is nothing more than a series of HTTP (or HTTPS) requests, because the stream is segmented into small parts (example: small 30-second videos/audios). This way, browsers can consume the stream without having to open TCP/UDP connections like in RTMP/RTSP streams via Flash.

So, if you want to cache this stream, so that your users don’t hit Wowza directly (upstream/origin), you could simply put a reverse proxy (Nginx for example) ahead, which would be much more efficient than implementing this proxy in PHP. Another solution that would be much more robust would be to use a CDN to cache and deliver this stream - but this will generate higher costs, so it needs to be considered well.

I can share some examples of Nginx configuration if anyone is interested in the future.