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I have a Wordpress site. I am using the s2Member pro plugin. I want to share videos with visitors on my site, I don't however want them to be able to download it. I know it is impossible to fully protect videos on the web. Like, if I look on Youtube and similar sites, everybody is able to grab these videos. The only thing I want is to hide the URL in the source and to disable the right-click "Save link as" on the video. I think the right way of how to do it is via Flash and RMTP server. I have account on S3 Amazon and Cloudfront which supports RMTP and secure streaming I think.

Does anyone have any advice for me of how I can secure the videos?

Tunaki
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Dominik Vávra
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2 Answers2

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If you provide media for the user to see it's impossible to make it read only. You're sending it to him to play it, so he can save it if he really wants to.

You can make it harder to save (by hiding the link to the video in a wrapper of some sorts, disabling right click for the mouse, etc.) but if someone want's to copy it hard enough - he will.

To hide the URL of the video you can leave the construction of the URL to the flash player (assuming you use one and you can edit its code). You can pass an ID to the player and it will be used to create an URL and play the video. For example, id=VID01 could be translated to /videos/secret_folder_name/01/video_vid01.flv. You could do this with javascript or PHP too, but it'll be easier to find the link that way.

PHP option. Make a file (f.ex. 'video.php') and make it accept a GET variable(f.ex. vid). So you'll write src="video.php?vid=15". Inside the file you can construct the URL and serve the file. You should check HTTP_REFERER to see if the call is coming from your server (although this can be faked, but it will prevent the most simple attempts to get the URL).

You can get some info about disabling the right click here - How do I disable right click on my web page? (along with some info on why you probably shouldn't do it)

Community
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spaceman
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  • Yeah, it is exactly what i write upward. So have you any advice how to exactly hide video link from source and disable right click ? – Dominik Vávra Jan 27 '14 at 18:34
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As you mentioned, to hide the link etc, it would be even more benefitial if you can stream the video, sothat the mms:// or rtsp:// link wont be easily downloadable. Otherwise, users will be able to see the media link in the chrome network console, or running fiddler, and they could copy the link and paste it again to the browser, and browser will show a 'download prompt' to downoad your video.

If you make it a streaming link, then the above method wont work, instead the user has to rely on third party 'stream capture' software, which can record the mms:// link to disk.

For even more protection, you can go for DRM (Digital rights management), sothat even if they download the video, it will be useless. DRM will be bix expensive, by the way.

Hope this helps.

Aby
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