is php file_get_contents() enough for downloading movies ?

Question

is file_get_contents() enough for downloading remote movie files located on a server ?

i just think that perhaps storing large movie files to string is harmful ? according to the php docs.

OR do i need to use cURL ? I dont know cURL.

UPDATE: these are big movie files. around 200MB each.

Answer 1

As @mopoke suggested it could depend on the size of the file. For a small movie it may suffice. In general I think cURL would be a better fit though. You have much more flexibility with it than with file_get_contents().

Answer 2

For the best performance you may find it makes sense to just use a standard unix util like WGET. You should be able to call it with system("wget ...") or exec() http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.system.php

Answer 3

file_get_contents() is a problem because it's going to load the entire file into memory in one go. If you have enough memory to support the operation (taking into account that if this is a web server, you may have multiple hits that generate this behavior simultaneously, and therefore each need that much memory), then file_get_contents() should be fine. However, it's not the right way to do it - you should use a library specifically intended for these sort of operations. As mentioned by others, cURL will do the trick, or wget. You might also have good luck using fopen('http://someurl', 'r') and reading blocks from the file and then dumping them straight to a local file that's been opened for write privileges.

Answer 4

you can read a few bytes at a time using fread().

$src="http://somewhere/test.avi";
$dst="test.avi";
$f = fopen($src, 'rb');
$o = fopen($dst, 'wb');
while (!feof($f)) {
     if (fwrite($o, fread($f, 2048)) === FALSE) {
        return 1;
     }
}
fclose($f);
fclose($o);