Protecting Hosted Video

[miketpowell]

I'm about to start some things with custom video and would like to make it at least challenging for people to rip the video from me. I've served media such as pictures before with amazon cloud for speed but I didn't care about them getting ripped. I'd like to use amazon cloud to serve the video as well but don't have a clue of how to host/play it in any secured fashion. I read that it could be done but couldn't find anything that explained exactly how though.

I've tried looking around for this but haven't been able to figure it out on my own yet. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

 

[dhamma]

You´d need a streaming video solution - Flash Media Server (Adobe FMS) is expensive as hell - Red5 (red5.org) is open source but complicated to set up.
Wowza has a free version - but only for 10 concurrent connections. Great product too!
flash media server - Wowza Media Server Pro

Streams can also be recorded - but it´s far more complicated than looking up the source.

Look for services if you don´t want to set up your own streaming server.

Hotlinking can be fought with some apache directives (.htaccess).

 

[templeofboom]

Where there's a will there's a way, and someone can capture the stream given an ounce of motivation.

Is no one using Helix/Real instead of flash?

 

[jryan21]

Not sure how viable this is, but maybe try encoding with a really fucked up aspect ratio, then set your player to correct it. If they rip video straight from the source it won't look right in their standard player.

 

[miketpowell]

I know it can be ripped no matter what but I figure making it at least a little challenging could be worth it.

I took a look at FMS before and a one time fee of $1000 wouldn't be so bad to me for what I'm going to be doing. I was unclear of how it would work though with amazon. Could I buy it and install it on a sever and use it in conjunction some way with amazon so the brute of the hosting would be on amazon and not the server?

Any suggestions on services from anyone? I'd want something something that has near unlimited amount of sim. connections and charges on bandwidth or something.

That's an interesting suggestion about the aspect ratio but would it be possible to check it out pretty easily in the player stats? Or is there a good way to prevent that?

 

[dhamma]

I know it can be ripped no matter what but I figure making it at least a little challenging could be worth it.

I took a look at FMS before and a one time fee of $1000 wouldn't be so bad to me for what I'm going to be doing. I was unclear of how it would work though with amazon. Could I buy it and install it on a sever and use it in conjunction some way with amazon so the brute of the hosting would be on amazon and not the server?

Any suggestions on services from anyone? I'd want something something that has near unlimited amount of sim. connections and charges on bandwidth or something.

That's an interesting suggestion about the aspect ratio but would it be possible to check it out pretty easily in the player stats? Or is there a good way to prevent that?

1000$ is not that bad - I had like 4-5K in mind... didn´t check for quite some time.

Regarding Amazon - I think there are some preconfigured AMIs around (Amazon Instances).
Alternatively you might want to look for "hosted fms" or "hosted wowza" .. etc.

Wowza has an offer for EC2
Wowza Media Server for EC2