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I am currently using JWPlayer on my site, and I have been asked to secure the video. The only problem is that the way the video works, the video URL is simply placed in the tag. If anyone want's to download the video they simply view source and there it is.

Can anyone think of a way I can at least make it somewhat hard for people to download the video. I understand that it's pretty much impossible to secure a video (if sites like youtube and all the others don't manage it) But I at least want to be able to make it hard.

Chud37
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One simple way would be to disallow "hotlinking" to the video. In other words: answer to a request only when a "proper" referer header is sent along. This way, one cannot simply copy&paste the video's URL to the address bar and download it.

In Apache with mod_rewrite, this would be something like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\\.)?yoursite\\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \\.(mp4)$ - [NC,F]

Of course you'd need to adjust the part about yoursite\\.com and the part about mp4.

Note that browsers (or "privacy settings") that don't send the referer header won't play the video even in the player.

Roman
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You might find this link useful to read.

http://flowplayer.blacktrash.org/secure-http.html

However I would suggest you to use Amazon CloudFront services for streaming your content. They have signed URLs for videos which are usually hard to download as they get expired after some time interval, but surely not impossible.

Abdul Haseeb
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  • Yes, I will look into them, thanks. Cost is a bit of an issue though at the moment but if it's not too bad then it could possibly be an option. – Chud37 Nov 13 '12 at 13:46