Can the RealPlayer plugin be circumvented?

Question

I'm wondering if anyone knows how to definitively stop the RealPlayer plugin from allowing a user to download videos.

So I work for a company that streams video learning for members. Most our videos are available to paying customers, and all are copyright of my company.

So the new version of RealPlayer has a streaming video downloader integrated into it, so if you're on a webpage with a video, the RealPlayer download window pops up and gives you the option to download the video. In webkit the .mp4 is downloaded and in FireFox (and the RealPlayer browser) the .flv version is downloaded.

So far my code is this:

(function(){
   var pluginArray = navigator.plugins;
   var ua = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/536.26.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) RealPlayer/12.0.1.1750'

   for ( var i = 0; i < pluginArray.length; i++ ) {

      // check to see if the plugin is installed
      if ( pluginArray[i].description === "RealPlayer Plugin" )
      {
         console.log( pluginArray[i].description + ' is installed.' );

         //checks to see if you're using the RealPlayer browser
         var re1='.*?'; // Non-greedy match on filler
         var re2='(RealPlayer)';  // Word 1

         var p = new RegExp( re1 + re2, ["i"] );
         var m = p.exec( ua );

         if ( m != null )
         {
            console.log( 'You are using the RealPlayer Browser' )
         }
      }
   }
})();

With this logic, I'm open to suggestions on what to do next. Ideally, we don't want to totally block the content because most our users probably aren't downloading the videos, but for the ones that are, we want to stop it. Is there anyway to prevent this?

Do you mean circumvented? ['Circumnavigated'](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumnavigate) usually means going around the world. — Andrew Mao, Mar 21 '13 at 19:54
There is no way. When the data gets transfered to the users machine, the user can access and copy it. All you are doing is causing annoyance to your paying customers. — Philipp, Mar 21 '13 at 20:25
You're spitting into the wind. Even if you manage to stop RealPlayer from saving the video, there are plenty of other ways to achieve the same thing. What are you going to do to stop the user who points a video camera at his monitor? ;) — Tim Goodman, Mar 21 '13 at 20:41
@TimGoodman demand that the user installs a program which gives you control over their webcam while they watch the video, so you can make sure they don't have another camera anywhere. — Philipp, Mar 21 '13 at 20:45
The reason we want to stop this is because RealPlayer makes it very easy to convert our content into various formats which is making our iOS department obsolete. Not to mention keeping it off the torrent sites or re-distributed on YouTube. — clint_milner, Mar 21 '13 at 20:45
When you are afraid of piracy you should reconsider your business model, because there is no way to prevent it in this day and age. — Philipp, Mar 21 '13 at 20:48
Longtime Real content person here. Back around RealProducer G2, they had flags for "Allow Downloading" and "Allow Recording" that you could uncheck and users could no longer grab your content. I'm afraid that ship has sailed. Just last week I was wondering where that feature has gone. It is no longer in RealProducer and a search indicates that this feature disappeared sometime around 2002. Those flags do not exist in the command line versions of RealProducer anymore, either. Looking around, Helix Universal Server Professional (which is new to me) now supports some DRM. — MetaHyperBolic, Aug 14 '13 at 16:46

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

It looks like wmv encoding and backchannel multicasting are your friends here:

Helix Server supports RTMPS and HTTPS for secure content delivery and can support the distribution of Windows Media DRM protected content. Helix Security Manager can also be used to secure access to content URLs over RTSP/udp/multicast traffic.

Helix Server supports the ability to multicast content using scalable multicasting (true broadcast over IP) or using back-channel multicast (content is broadcast over multicast but there is a control connection always open to the server for authentication).

With scalable multicasting there is no protection method as the content is available to any device that can play it back on the network however backchannel multicast can be protected. Back channel multicast however is only possible with RealMedia content played in the RealPlayer.

References

Can the RealPlayer plugin be circumvented?

1 Answers1