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I am working a website, and I'm trying to prevent the video file to be downloadable.

I've already prevented the right click function, and I've used a webiste called http://htmlobfuscator.com/ that allows the source code to be very difficult to decipher. The only issue I now have remaining is the inspect element feature on browsers. Does anyone know of any way to prevent this? I know that someone is always going to find a way to download or capture a video, but I'm just trying to limit the spread of my videos.

Thanks for your help, Stephen

Stephen_Josey
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  • An easy solution would be to host it on a third-party service like Vimeo or YouTube, and just embed their streaming player. – hoverbikes Oct 31 '14 at 02:46
  • @hoverbikes Thank you for the response! I didn't want to do that however, because it's going to be a site full of videos, and there are many ways to download a video from YouTube. Do you have any other suggestions? – Stephen_Josey Oct 31 '14 at 03:07
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    It's impossible to prevent someone from downloading your video, and trying to handle it client-side adds a whole other layer to making it impossible. And, please, don't disable right-click. That does **absolutely nothing** to prevent anyone from doing anything, other than a useful browser context menu. If YouTube, Netflix, BBC, and everyone else doesn't have some magic method to prevent people from downloading, are you absolutely sure that you do? – Brad Oct 31 '14 at 03:26
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    the only way to make this hard enough to stop a 10 year old from grabbing content is use a DRM provider and a Flash or HTML5 EME/MediaCrypto solution. Even then there are ways around it. Is the value of your content significant enough to warrant Studio level protection? – Offbeatmammal Oct 31 '14 at 13:41

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There is no way to stop a browser's document inspector from finding your file's location. However, I am a recording musician, and I know of a few things you can do to make thieving more difficult.

  1. Put your JS video location in an external file. Not a lot of protection here, but worthwhile enough to add.
  2. Break up the video location into a few different JS variables. Your thief would at least need some basic JavaScript knowledge to get to the video location.
  3. Use an obfuscater, like you did. (I LOVE HTMLObfuscator!)
  4. You could use flash video. This is difficult to download, but slower viewing, and also a bit more difficult to create and host on your website.

The best thing to use is streaming video, but not everyone is able to do that either.

Good luck!

Ian Hazzard
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    **None** of the items in your list prevent someone from just peeking at the network traffic for 4 seconds and snagging the video URL. You can do this in-browser, via debugging proxy like Fiddler, Wireshark, etc. This is the easiest way to get at media, and is the method used by most tools for ripping content from sites. – Brad Oct 31 '14 at 03:29
  • @Brad, There is not a fool-proof way to do this. These are just a few ideas to make it harder. – Ian Hazzard Oct 31 '14 at 17:28
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There is no actually way of completely stopping someone, you could however as some have mentioned use something like Vimeo or YouTube to minimize the downloading of your videos, or another way you could do it and have found from personal experience is either creating a login/register on your site to make someone signup to get your video thus minimizing how many can download it or you can encrypt the video with a password, i believe Vimeo has this option which requires someone to enter a password in before even viewing the video.

Yet these are just two ways to Minimize not completely stop.

Simpson
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