[LRUG] Rails: using send_file to send video to the browser

Jesse Waites jesse.waites at gmail.com
Wed Aug 5 06:22:42 PDT 2015


I would consider having a third party take care of the video
hosting/streaming component. There is a company here in Boston called
Wistia (They're also a Rails shop) that does professional video hosting,
and their feature list includes "Domain Restriction - Take complete control
over your videos by restricting the sites and domains where they can be
played." - That might be a good option. I suggest this because it sounds
like hosting your own video can get quite complicated. Then you have to
think about CDNs, etc. The pricing seems quite reasonable (A free tier, and
$25 for a nonbranded video player and 100 videos)

http://wistia.com/product

http://wistia.com/pricing


Good luck!

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 9:12 AM, Tom Armitage <tom at infovore.org> wrote:

> I'm working on a project that displays HTML5 video in the browser, and
> access to those videos is controlled.
>
> Previously, I was using an expiring S3 URL; now I'm hosting the video
> myself, attached via Paperclip. The uploads directory is outside the
> /public directory of the Rails app; there's a URL for the video that, when
> a user hits it, checks if they're authorised to view it, and if so, uses
> send_file to send it to them.
>
> This no longer works very well now that I'm using send_file - I *think* this
> comes down to the fact the browser requests video with Range headers,
> getting it in chunks, and my poor back-end clearly isn't doing something
> sophisticiated enough.
>
> My initial thoughts were:
>
> * something like [
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6759426/rails-media-file-stream-accept-byte-range-request-through-send-data-or-send-file],
> which odes the chunking manually but is beginning to make me feel stupid,
> and also feels fragile
> * is Puma the issue, and would a better web server for development work?
>
> I'm asking because whilst I think I've found the right track, some of you
> might have had experience of this before.
>
> t.
>
> --
> Tom Armitage
> http://infovore.org
> 07813 060578
>
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-- 
Jesse Waites
JesseWaites.com
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