# Serving a FLV through rails **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [November 1, 2007, 6:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957 "2007-11-01T18:40:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b2d939/32.png) [@mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mhfs)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2007, 6:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957/1 "2007-11-01T18:40:53Z")
Hello list, The website I’m developing has many FLV-encoded videos as it’s main products. Currently I’m just throwing the FLVs in a public folder, however, the client would like more control over the serving of these files. I don’t want the webserver to serve it raw, I’d like a Rails controller’s action to serve it, something like /videos/render/1. This action would in turn load the FLV, process any logic (such as checking if the user has access to it etc) and only then serve it to the client. However, I have no clue on how I could possibly accomplish this. Any help would be very much appreciated! Thanks, Marcelo. ---
**Author:** ![mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b2d939/32.png) [@mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mhfs)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2007, 6:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957/2 "2007-11-01T18:57:17Z")
On thing that may not have been clear, the example I gave of /videos/render/1 would not render html with a code to embed a FLV, instead, it would send the actual FLV file and then the other viewer pages would use this URL to access the video files and not the file name as it would have been the case if the files were served via the webserver (/videos/file.flv) - the point here is that I need to process logic before serving the file something that I would like to integrate into my rails app (such as checking if the logged user has permissions to get this file!). Thanks! ---
**Author:** ![mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b2d939/32.png) [@mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mhfs)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2007, 7:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957/3 "2007-11-01T19:45:14Z")
Hey, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it might be informative: [http://blog.snowonrails.com/articles/2007/05/31/how-to-build-a-mini-youtube-using-activemessaging-plugin-and-amazon-s3](http://blog.snowonrails.com/articles/2007/05/31/how-to-build-a-mini-youtube-using-activemessaging-plugin-and-amazon-s3) ---
**Author:** ![mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b2d939/32.png) [@mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mhfs)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2007, 2:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957/4 "2007-11-02T02:34:45Z")
Hi Matthew, thanks for the reply - yes, I’ve seen this and it is a very good tutorial, however it does not show how to do what I want - serve FLV through Ruby/Rails. Take for example the serving of images through a script - instead of outputing HTML, you output binary data and tell the client (browser) that it is a image/jpg (I did it many times in PHP) - What I would like to know is how could I do this in Ruby/Rails. Marcelo. ---
**Author:** ![mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b2d939/32.png) [@mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mhfs)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2007, 2:39am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957/5 "2007-11-02T02:39:26Z")
Marcelo de Moraes S. wrote: > Hi Matthew, thanks for the reply - yes, I’ve seen this and it is a > very good tutorial, however it does not show how to do what I want - > serve FLV through Ruby/Rails. Take for example the serving of images > through a script - instead of outputing HTML, you output binary data > and tell the client (browser) that it is a image/jpg (I did it many > times in PHP) - What I would like to know is how could I do this in > Ruby/Rails. Look for the send\_file method on [api.rubyonrail.org](http://api.rubyonrail.org). In most cases involving large files (like FLV) it won’t be enough though. You most likely will get huge Ruby processes lying around because of buffering. Look for secure download plugins for mongrel or your favorite HTTP server to solve this problem. Lionel ---
**Author:** ![mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b2d939/32.png) [@mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mhfs)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2007, 2:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957/6 "2007-11-02T14:12:05Z")
Hi Marcelo, > Hi Matthew, thanks for the reply - yes, I’ve seen this and it is a very > good > tutorial, however it does not show how to do what I want - serve FLV > through > Ruby/Rails. Take for example the serving of images through a script - > instead of outputing HTML, you output binary data and tell the client > (browser) that it is a image/jpg (I did it many times in PHP) - What I > would > like to know is how could I do this in Ruby/Rails. Check out WhooTube [1]. It does what you want! [1] [http://www.nedforce.com/2007/6/11/whootube-ruby-on-rails-video-streaming-open-sourced](http://www.nedforce.com/2007/6/11/whootube-ruby-on-rails-video-streaming-open-sourced) – Roderick van Domburg [http://www.nedforce.com](http://www.nedforce.com) ---
**Author:** ![mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b2d939/32.png) [@mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mhfs)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2007, 5:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957/7 "2007-11-02T17:39:34Z")
Hi Roderick, thanks a bunch for this! ---
**Author:** ![mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b2d939/32.png) [@mhfs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mhfs)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2007, 6:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/serving-a-flv-through-rails/118957/8 "2007-11-03T18:20:28Z")
I think what you’re looking for is X-Sendfile. There’s a Rails plugin at [http://john.guen.in/rdoc/x\_send\_file/](http://john.guen.in/rdoc/x_send_file/) and it works with an Apache module that you can find at [http://john.guen.in/rdoc/x\_send\_file/](http://john.guen.in/rdoc/x_send_file/). This allows Rails to handle the decision to serve the file, but then let the file itself be statically served. You definitely don’t want to serve video files through send\_file. Michael [www.buildingwebapps.com](http://www.buildingwebapps.com) On Nov 1, 6:38 pm, Lionel B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)