Php stream mp4 without downloading

Replying to cg

I'm a little new to all this so I apologize if I don't explain myself clearly.

No worries! Everybody has to start somewhere. :)

When we use the built in wordpress file uploader and upload an mp4 file it will not play in Safari. The resource is loaded, it seems, as the site will return for the video file, but it won't play, probably because wordpress is offering the file in one chunk, whereas Safari is trying to load it in bytes.

When a web browser asks a server for an asset (an image, video, web page, etc.), the first thing Apache does is check to see whether that asset exists. (A file that literally exists on your server is what I meant earlier by "static content".)

If the file exists, Apache just passes it along. Job done, champagne!

If it doesn't, this is when WordPress gets involved. Apache will route the request through WordPress and PHP, and WordPress will put together some sort of response to send back to the browser. (Usually this will be some sort of HTML document.)

This is all rather technical, but the main takeaway is that — unless you have deviated from the default Apache/WordPress configuration — WordPress is not serving anything but text.

When your blog address is entered into Safari, Safari asks your server for that document, then parses the HTML it gets back for any additional URLs (images, video, etc.), then sends additional requests for those.

When you uploaded the MP4 video through WordPress, WordPress simply saved a copy of it on the server. Whenever any browser asks for that, Apache will find it and serve it directly.

There are plenty of other reasons your MP4 might not be streaming the way you expect:

• Apache might not be configured correctly to handle that kind of request.
• The video might not be encoded with web-streaming in mind.
• Safari's release cycle has not yet evolved to cope with the fast pace of web development; if you are even a couple versions out-of-date (the latest release also requires the latest MacOS), MP4 support might be incomplete or buggy.

I'm going to go ahead and close this ticket as this issue is not related to WordPress, but thank you again for reporting, and I hope you discover the nature of the issue.