⚠️ Academic & Research Disclaimer: This project is a strict Proof of Concept (PoC) developed solely for educational purposes, network engineering research, and testing video streaming protocols. It is NOT a commercial product, nor is it intended to bypass DRM, violate Twitch's Terms of Service, or permanently host copyrighted material. The primary goal is to study the mechanics of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and stream relays in constrained environments.
This repository contains an experimental Video CDN relay built entirely in pure PHP. It was designed to research how video streaming data is processed, routed, and cached at the server level, specifically focusing on the widely used HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) architecture.
Instead of utilizing ready-made streaming servers, this project manually handles network requests and video chunking to demonstrate a deep understanding of network layers and multimedia delivery.
The core mechanics studied in this project include:
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HLS Protocol Interaction (Relay Node): The application acts as an experimental relay node. It parses public
.m3u8manifests and processes.ts(MPEG-TS) video segments. This was built to analyze how chunked video data can be retrieved, buffered, and re-transmitted efficiently across network boundaries. -
Edge Caching & Buffer Management: To simulate CDN edge-server behavior, the script tests transient caching (temporary storage) of video segments. This research focuses on measuring latency reduction, optimizing I/O operations, and managing bandwidth constraints when serving high-throughput media directly via PHP.
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Raw Performance Benchmarking: Implemented in pure PHP without heavy underlying frameworks to test and benchmark the raw execution speed, HTTP header manipulation, and memory management limits of the language under continuous streaming loads.
Architected and developed by masterking32 as part of an independent study into network engineering, distributed systems, and video streaming technologies.