Talk:Flash Streaming to FlowPlayer using only PHP

From RMBwiki

Hi rmbwebs,

I just discovered FlowPlayer some minutes ago. I've been struggling the entire day trying to figure out how to broadcast live TV from my web page. I'm on a shared hosting but I think I have enough bandwidth to provide about 10 simultaneous streams of about 100 kbps each. I don't think I will ever reach that level of visits, so that's not a concern to me.

As far as I've understood, I cannot do what I want without upgrading to a dedicated server or so. I don't have an rtmp server on my shared hosting.

But after reading your PHP-based solution, I was thinking if this could be accomplished in some way telling PHP to get the stream from some URL. As far as I've seen, fopen works with URL. What if I'm streaming an .flv from my computer? (Videolan can do that). Of course, I could not seek, wich is nonsense for a live broadcast. Another idea is I could encode the live TV feed in my local computer and upload the stream as it gets encoded. I could upload it to the server and tell PHP to broadcast it live, starting to play the file from the position X, wich X is the size of the .flv file when the user loaded the page. That would require a considerable amount of space in the server and "resetting" (deleting) the uploaded file every fixed amount of time, before filling up the hard disk. Or maybe I could have and FTP server on my computer and get the encoded .flv file into it and use PHP to connect through ftp to it, then broadcast. There are also http functions and even strem functions... finally, there are sockets. I suspect some of these could be useful to accomplish live tv broadcast without a dedicated server... but it's pure speculation.

So if you have any idead and/or you know what I'm talking about, any help would be greately appreciated!

Best regards,

Pere

pere DOT pasqual AT gmail DOT com