RE: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking? How do I do that?
Hey Bill,
This is indeed pretty easy to do. We do it for a number of reasons,
from collecting statistical information to finding the most appropriate
server to deliver the video from, which means that our code for doing
this is pretty complicated. Your code can probably be much simpler.
I'm not really a php programmer (I'm more of a perl guy), but this kind
of form should work for you assuming you have a call style like
http://mywebsite.com/video.php?video=bar.mpg:
?php
$videos['foo.mpg'] = 'http://bar.baz/foo.mpg';
$videos['bar.mpg'] = 'http://foo.baz/bar.mpg';
// Do what you want to collect data, et cetera
header('Location: ' . $videos[$_GET['video']];
?
You should probably consider this pseudo code and not actual code, since
my recollection of php syntax and variable instantiation is pretty
rusty. One thing to keep in mind is that you cannot output anything
from your php script prior to calling the header() function -- if it
isn't the first thing you call that produces output your script will
break with an ugly HTML Web page with a big bold error message in the
middle of it.
Yours,
Mike
Co-founder CEO, blip.tv
-Original Message-
From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of billshackelford
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:39 AM
To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking?
How do I do that?
Blip.tv has permalinks like this:
http://blip.tv/file/get/Bshack-PopPopPop659.m4v
When you click on it, it will redirect to the actual file
location. When it redirects it also gathers information about
you for stats. The above link will work in itunes even with
the redirects.
How do they do that? I could I do that with PHP?
Yahoo! Groups Links
Re: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking? How do I do that?
Your syntax is spot on. It's only lacking one crucial thing. Per default
PHP is sent as text/html so along with the Location header you need to
send the correct content-type header (to build on your example):
header('Content-type: video/mpg');
header('Location: '.$videos[$_GET['video']]);
And since Mike was writing pseudocode you also need to add your own input
checking (e.g. throw a 404 if the video isn't found) and so on.
As Mike demonstrated the difficult bit is not sending the headers. It's
deciding what kind of stats you want to save and then building the
database scripts to deal with it.
- Andreas
Den 23.01.2007 kl. 14:47 skrev Mike Hudack [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
Hey Bill,
This is indeed pretty easy to do. We do it for a number of reasons,
from collecting statistical information to finding the most appropriate
server to deliver the video from, which means that our code for doing
this is pretty complicated. Your code can probably be much simpler.
I'm not really a php programmer (I'm more of a perl guy), but this kind
of form should work for you assuming you have a call style like
http://mywebsite.com/video.php?video=bar.mpg:
?php
$videos['foo.mpg'] = 'http://bar.baz/foo.mpg';
$videos['bar.mpg'] = 'http://foo.baz/bar.mpg';
// Do what you want to collect data, et cetera
header('Location: ' . $videos[$_GET['video']];
?
You should probably consider this pseudo code and not actual code, since
my recollection of php syntax and variable instantiation is pretty
rusty. One thing to keep in mind is that you cannot output anything
from your php script prior to calling the header() function -- if it
isn't the first thing you call that produces output your script will
break with an ugly HTML Web page with a big bold error message in the
middle of it.
Yours,
Mike
Co-founder CEO, blip.tv
-Original Message-
From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of billshackelford
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:39 AM
To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking?
How do I do that?
Blip.tv has permalinks like this:
http://blip.tv/file/get/Bshack-PopPopPop659.m4v
When you click on it, it will redirect to the actual file
location. When it redirects it also gathers information about
you for stats. The above link will work in itunes even with
the redirects.
How do they do that? I could I do that with PHP?
Yahoo! Groups Links
--
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
URL: http://www.solitude.dk/
RE: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking? How do I do that?
Andreas, you don't need to set Content-type to video/mpg, in fact I
believe that doing so is destructive.
The actual content returned in the redirect response is either
text/plain or text/html, and NOT video/mpg. When the browser follows
the redirect and requests the actual video file it will receive the
proper content-type from the server, presumably video/mpg. If you set
your redirect response to video/mpg and send it to a browser that
doesn't support redirects for some odd reason the user is going to get a
really weird looking page, maybe even a video player without a video.
So don't set the content type explicitly. PHP or Apache will handle
this for you, returning either text/html or text/plain depending on the
format of the The file you have requested has temporarily moved to...
message.
Yours,
Mike
-Original Message-
From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andreas
Haugstrup Pedersen
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 9:10 AM
To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download
tracking? How do I do that?
Your syntax is spot on. It's only lacking one crucial thing.
Per default PHP is sent as text/html so along with the
Location header you need to send the correct content-type
header (to build on your example):
header('Content-type: video/mpg');
header('Location: '.$videos[$_GET['video']]);
And since Mike was writing pseudocode you also need to add
your own input checking (e.g. throw a 404 if the video isn't
found) and so on.
As Mike demonstrated the difficult bit is not sending the
headers. It's deciding what kind of stats you want to save
and then building the database scripts to deal with it.
- Andreas
Den 23.01.2007 kl. 14:47 skrev Mike Hudack [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
Hey Bill,
This is indeed pretty easy to do. We do it for a number of
reasons,
from collecting statistical information to finding the most
appropriate server to deliver the video from, which means that our
code for doing this is pretty complicated. Your code can
probably be much simpler.
I'm not really a php programmer (I'm more of a perl guy), but this
kind of form should work for you assuming you have a call style like
http://mywebsite.com/video.php?video=bar.mpg:
?php
$videos['foo.mpg'] = 'http://bar.baz/foo.mpg';
$videos['bar.mpg'] = 'http://foo.baz/bar.mpg';
// Do what you want to collect data, et cetera
header('Location: ' . $videos[$_GET['video']]; ?
You should probably consider this pseudo code and not actual code,
since my recollection of php syntax and variable instantiation is
pretty rusty. One thing to keep in mind is that you cannot output
anything from your php script prior to calling the header()
function
-- if it isn't the first thing you call that produces output your
script will break with an ugly HTML Web page with a big bold error
message in the middle of it.
Yours,
Mike
Co-founder CEO, blip.tv
-Original Message-
From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of billshackelford
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:39 AM
To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking?
How do I do that?
Blip.tv has permalinks like this:
http://blip.tv/file/get/Bshack-PopPopPop659.m4v
When you click on it, it will redirect to the actual file
location.
When it redirects it also gathers information about you for stats.
The above link will work in itunes even with the redirects.
How do they do that? I could I do that with PHP?
Yahoo! Groups Links
--
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
URL: http://www.solitude.dk/
Yahoo! Groups Links
Re: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking? How do I do that?
You're right of course. I got things messed up in my head (thinking of the
case where you'd pipe a file through readfile()). That'll teach me to act
smart. :o)
- Andreas
Den 23.01.2007 kl. 15:49 skrev Mike Hudack [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
Andreas, you don't need to set Content-type to video/mpg, in fact I
believe that doing so is destructive.
The actual content returned in the redirect response is either
text/plain or text/html, and NOT video/mpg. When the browser follows
the redirect and requests the actual video file it will receive the
proper content-type from the server, presumably video/mpg. If you set
your redirect response to video/mpg and send it to a browser that
doesn't support redirects for some odd reason the user is going to get a
really weird looking page, maybe even a video player without a video.
So don't set the content type explicitly. PHP or Apache will handle
this for you, returning either text/html or text/plain depending on the
format of the The file you have requested has temporarily moved to...
message.
Yours,
Mike
-Original Message-
From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andreas
Haugstrup Pedersen
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 9:10 AM
To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download
tracking? How do I do that?
Your syntax is spot on. It's only lacking one crucial thing.
Per default PHP is sent as text/html so along with the
Location header you need to send the correct content-type
header (to build on your example):
header('Content-type: video/mpg');
header('Location: '.$videos[$_GET['video']]);
And since Mike was writing pseudocode you also need to add
your own input checking (e.g. throw a 404 if the video isn't
found) and so on.
As Mike demonstrated the difficult bit is not sending the
headers. It's deciding what kind of stats you want to save
and then building the database scripts to deal with it.
- Andreas
Den 23.01.2007 kl. 14:47 skrev Mike Hudack [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
Hey Bill,
This is indeed pretty easy to do. We do it for a number of
reasons,
from collecting statistical information to finding the most
appropriate server to deliver the video from, which means that our
code for doing this is pretty complicated. Your code can
probably be much simpler.
I'm not really a php programmer (I'm more of a perl guy), but this
kind of form should work for you assuming you have a call style like
http://mywebsite.com/video.php?video=bar.mpg:
?php
$videos['foo.mpg'] = 'http://bar.baz/foo.mpg';
$videos['bar.mpg'] = 'http://foo.baz/bar.mpg';
// Do what you want to collect data, et cetera
header('Location: ' . $videos[$_GET['video']]; ?
You should probably consider this pseudo code and not actual code,
since my recollection of php syntax and variable instantiation is
pretty rusty. One thing to keep in mind is that you cannot output
anything from your php script prior to calling the header()
function
-- if it isn't the first thing you call that produces output your
script will break with an ugly HTML Web page with a big bold error
message in the middle of it.
Yours,
Mike
Co-founder CEO, blip.tv
-Original Message-
From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of billshackelford
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:39 AM
To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking?
How do I do that?
Blip.tv has permalinks like this:
http://blip.tv/file/get/Bshack-PopPopPop659.m4v
When you click on it, it will redirect to the actual file
location.
When it redirects it also gathers information about you for stats.
The above link will work in itunes even with the redirects.
How do they do that? I could I do that with PHP?
Yahoo! Groups Links
--
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
URL: http://www.solitude.dk/
Yahoo! Groups Links
--
Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen
URL: http://www.solitude.dk/
[videoblogging] Permalinks and download tracking? How do I do that?
Blip.tv has permalinks like this: http://blip.tv/file/get/Bshack-PopPopPop659.m4v When you click on it, it will redirect to the actual file location. When it redirects it also gathers information about you for stats. The above link will work in itunes even with the redirects. How do they do that? I could I do that with PHP?
