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I have a web application with a simple structure. The teacher uploads the videos from the backend and students view them on frontend using their respective logins. I am using flowplayer for displaying videos on frontend.

When teacher uploads a video, it gets stored in a web directory and its pointer (filename) is saved in database. On frontend, a query fetches the file name and video url is supplied to flowplayer.

Pretty straight? Now with some means those videos may be downloaded from frontend. Is there actually a way to prevent download of videos considering the structure of my app? I found the flowplayer api has some plugin for secure streaming. But what i am doing in this app is streaming? If not, how i can accomplish prevention of video downloads?

Sushant Kumar Singh
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beNerd
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2 Answers2

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If the video can be delivered to the player then you'll not be able to stop a determined user from downloading it. You can make it harder using APIs to (eg) tokenize and timelimit URLs or break a video into a number of smaller pieces and step through them but it won't protect that assets. A more complex/expensive solution would be to use a DRM licensing system like PlayReady or Widevine that will allow you to issue licenses that you can associate with a user and are locked to particular business rules. If this is important I'd suggest looking at 3rd party providers such as Voped.com or implementing a Wowza based solution - but it's not as simple as the solution you have today

Offbeatmammal
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You can't, if client isn't allowed to download video, the player can't display them.

Secure streaming is just a complicated way to download video, it's not a magic way to prevent downloading.

Nikkau
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