url rewriting by .htaccess files in php

Question

I am rewriting my problem . Below I am giving all the details of what i am trying to do, and what is the result I am getting. I hope to be very clear this time. I have a samples page here www.broadcast2world.com/samples.php. All the links and data which we see on the page is coming from a database. Now suppose we click on a link "More Info" for a particular video say social control. A specific href for that video is triggered as <a href="video.php?pid='.$id.'"> . It passes its id over url in the format http://www.broadcast2world.com/video.php?pid=66.

I catch that id into a variable using

if(!isset($_GET['pid'])){
    $pageid='66';
}
else{
  $pageid=$_GET['pid'];  
} 

Using the $pageid variable, I run a query which ultimately prepare the page for that particular video.

What my SEO guy need is a url in the format www.broadcast2world.com/video/name-of-the-video.

Now the problem is that if I make a mod_rewrite amendments which is wonderfully explained by Ben below, I am not able to figure out, how to link that name-of-the-video to its id. I am sure there must be something I have to modify while creating specific url for videos as explained above. But I really don't know what? Thanks again for your wonderful support

Answer 1

Instead of id, you have to search the database based on title then.

Here are what you are going to need.

.htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^videos/(.*)$ video.php?title=$1

Link generation

$title = "...";
$title = str_replace(" ", "-", $title); //add dashes on the link
echo "<a href="videos/$title">Click Me</a>";

Answer 2

You should add a column in your videos table in which you will store name-of-the-video that is suitable to be put in URL. You will need to UPDATE all your videos and set the name-of-the-video to a unique value for each video. From then on it will be simple to fetch a video by name instead of by id.