Image script works on one server, fails on other

Roel018

Hi all,

I have written a script that get's a CGI video stream from my webcam's build-in server (streaming MJPEG content). The script just reads the incoming streaming data and outputs it into an HTML IMG tag. This works great on one server (my developer's server).

However, on my online, shared hosting server (where it is supposed to run), it doesn't work - probably due to the fact that the failing server is buffering the incoming data (since phpinfo() tells me output_buffering is set to 4096 - and on the server where it does work on it is set to 0, well, actually it just says 'No value') .. In fact, it does spit put something (a whole lot of images in a fraction of a second) after it has downloaded the 4 mb of data, but then it starts buffering again.. So what do I do? Do I just mail my shared hosting provider and to set the output_buffering (local or master values? - I don't know the difference) to 0/NoValue ?? Or are there any other things I'm missing here to get this to work?

One important other difference between the servers is that the server where it works on runs php version 5 and mine runs version 4.4.8 - Could this pose a problem as well??? (I can activate PHP 5 by request).

phpiknfo() results from WORKING server: http://www.emotiontracker.com/test1-results-derek.htm
phpiknfo() results from FAILING server: http://www.emotiontracker.com/test1-results-roel.htm

Hope to get some insights into this problem. Thanks in advance!
Roel.

P.s. it concerns a Windows Server so setting .htaccess is not an option.

johanafm

Have you tried invoking flush?

Roel018

Hi there!

Well, yes, this the script I'm using. It works perfectly on one server, but it doesn't work on the other:

<?php
  header('Content-type: multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary=endofsection');
  print "\n--endofsection\n";

  $pmt = array("-", "\\", "|", "/" );
  for( $i = 0; $i <10; $i ++ ){
      sleep(1);
      print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
      print "Part $i\t".$pmt[$i % 4];
      print "--endofsection\n";
      ob_flush();
      flush();
  }
  print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
  print "The end\n";
  print "--endofsection--\n";
?>

Thanks!

tave

Are you invoking ob_start() somewhere? It might be turned on by default in local server, but not in the shared server

johanafm

From the link I provided:
Several servers, especially on Win32, will still buffer the output from your script until it terminates before transmitting the results to the browser.

So I'd work the other way. Match your php settings locally to see if you can make your script break there. If it doesn't, it's likely a web server issue.

Also, if the buffer size isn't too big, you could pad data to match the buffer size.