Sending input to a command line program from PHP

Question

I'd like to be able to stop FFMPEG from PHP (on Windows).

What I'm doing now is starting it as so:

pclose(popen("start ffmpeg -i rtmp://livestream -o a_file.mp4", "r"));

But as soon as I've done that I've lost all connection to the program (right?).

I would like to send a 'q' to the process to stop it. Is there any way to do this?

EDIT: I should probably explain that I use pclose because I need the PHP script to keep running and thus close the file pointer. Maybe the question should be: How can I keep the script running and the file pointer open?

Answer 1

proc_open gives you a file pointer so you can then write to the input of the program. There are examples on the doc page.