Hi All, I'm new to php. Convinced of its performance advantage over perl, I decided to use it for my client's project. Background: the client outsourced the entire project to run on our website, with the media files hosted on other servers (initially one, potentially many if bandwidth demand dictates) on our website: the html pages, database storage, application code (php) What it is: the client offers DRM protected media files (copyrighted songs and lectures) for download. We are to track usage and dynamically generate download links for the media files from one/many servers publically available. We are not interested in protecting the paths to the download media files, and actually encourage direct links to downloads. the challenge: the files are in WMA/WMV format. When a user clicks on a link, they are to be prompted to save the file via "save/save as" dialog box, ie, force download , where the user gets prompted to the save dialog box in IE and firefox (and hopefully all browsers). Windows Media Player should not handle the download request. My findings: I could use the header() function and set content-type to application/unknown, among setting other header info. And I'd need to use the readfile(). the questions: 1- Say the client's server's pipe throughput is 6Mbps, and our server (where code is running), is a max of 1.5Mbps. Would that mean that the max speed a user gets when downloading is 1.5? ie, would our server be a bottleneck? 2- Technically, when readfile() is executed on our server, is it actually reading the remote file then piping the data to the end user?, ie, the file goes through like this remote_server -> our_server -> user's browser? My guess is yes, but would like to confirm with gurus. 3- Is there a way in php to simply serve the proper headers (to force download), then connect the user's browser to the download link (a public file) and leave the rest to http? What is not an option: we wouldn't consider compressing the files to zip format to work around the force download issue. Thanking you in advance.