Hide url of the video

[amrigo]

Hi

I would like to avoid people to copy my videos, grabbing the url, can i encapsulate the url of the cideo inside a swf file?

The swf file could have the viceo controls like play, pause stop and the ur of the video would be indicated in a way the users could not discover looking at the source code.

It is already possible or there is any other technique?

Thank´s in advance

[FourCourtJester]

There's two ways that Flash can load up an address of a movie:

- internally save the address. For every video you want to display, create seperate SWF files that just load in your external movie. This is one way to hide the address, but comes with the scaling issue (1 player per movie).

- externally. You can pass in the URL of the movie via flash parameters or thru javascript (either option exposes the address).

An alternative is to save the address of the movie in an external file. Flash could read in a flash paramater (ie - a number), and then in your flash player, parse the parameter and select the movie from an external source (ie - xml file) based upon whatever number you passed. That way you keep the source secret, but also solve the scaling issue (1 player for EVERY movie).

In order to accomplish this, you may want to read up on Flash Parameters and Flash XML Parsing.

[Eye for Video]

While the methods suggested above may help prevent copying the video url, it does not stop people from copying the video. Once they visit your site and view your movie, a copy already sites in the viewer's Temp Internet Files folder (unless it's true streaming). All they need to do is go there and copy the video file to where ever they may want.
Since almost any method used to prevent stealing Web videos will have work arounds, it's a good idea to watermark your video and use an appropriate intro and credits roll also. Sure the intro and credits can be edited out but the watermark is a little harder to remove.
Best wishes,
EfV

[amrigo]

Hi

Let me understand what is true streaming , what i do create is a publishing point from a recorded video and choose on-demand type wich is the type required.

[Eye for Video]

For true streaming you will have to use a special server. This server will can handle both pre-recorded data as well as live broadcasts. Yes you will create a publishing point but your host will furnish that information to you. Here is a good host that I can recommend:
http://www.upstreamnetworks.com/
Snoop around their site for more info and help with the concept of true streaming.
True streaming is much more expensive then progressive downloading video but it does provide a better means of protecting your video.
EfV

[Interested User]

There's two ways that Flash can load up an address of a movie:

- internally save the address. For every video you want to display, create seperate SWF files that just load in your external movie. This is one way to hide the address, but comes with the scaling issue (1 player per movie).

- externally. You can pass in the URL of the movie via flash parameters or thru javascript (either option exposes the address).

An alternative is to save the address of the movie in an external file. Flash could read in a flash paramater (ie - a number), and then in your flash player, parse the parameter and select the movie from an external source (ie - xml file) based upon whatever number you passed. That way you keep the source secret, but also solve the scaling issue (1 player for EVERY movie).

In order to accomplish this, you may want to read up on Flash Parameters and Flash XML Parsing.

This is really interesting and exactly matches my requirement. But I have a doubt, after the actual URL is read from XML doesn't it get exposed to browser which ultimately is accessible to end user. Can you pls explain how it works? Thanks in advance!

[tedscoffee]

You can visit this video player site for testing -- which is a FLV Video Player software (http://video.a4desk.com). This video player stores all video and its playlist in external XML file, so the actual path of the video file (FLV) is hidden in the source code. Seems it provides some protection -- however people can still use a FLV capturing software to steal the video, if they really wanna to --- there is always a way.