small members area video problem
 

in my members area

when i enter the members area of course my user and password has to be entered

when i click on a wmv it asks for the user name and password again

and then when i click on ANOTHER wmv it asks for the user and pass AGAIN

I remember there was a way to fix this by adding a line of code to apache

does anyone know anything about this

I'd be interested in this as well but i don't think it's going to happen.

In the past we worked on this issue and the only way we were able to eliminate this was to place the videos in a non/password protected folder and write some scripting that changes the name of this folder and the video links to a random value every 15 minutes. Similar to our FHG and HFS hotlink protection script we have written.

However this method also had it's issues for use in our members areas, mainly for dial up users that needed a longer time than 15 mins to download full length videos.

It's my understanding that when WMP tries to open a wmv inside pw protected folder the server thinks it's a new user because no referrer information is passed on by WMP. (or something like that) The only good thing is that WMP does allow you to save the user/pass just like IE, however that can also turn into a problem if your member is also using his WMP inside other pw protected sites. If so he has to remember to re enter the user/pass in his WMP again as WMP does not remember the correct user/pass when switching from site to site like IE does.

So sometimes when this happens the member gets frustrated, especially when he tries too many times and our trading/ brute force protection scripting kicks in and bans his ip for a short time.

If there is some Apache code that would eliminate WMP need for a user/pass and still have the movies password protected, that would be ultra cool.



EDIT,

BTW, I forgot to mention, if you embed the video player and open the videos on an html page then the user does not get prompted for a user/pass again. This might be a fix for some.

Members should only be prompted once per browser session. After that, the password is cached, at least in ie.

Yep, but that's not the issue here. It's Windows Media Player that is promting for an additional user/ pass

When as a surfer that happens to me I just leave the Windows Media Player open so when I click a new link on the web page it doesn't ask again...it will just play the new clip.

Hi all,

Ok, I am not a techie and on top of that I am blonde |badidea|

If I remember correctly we got around that issue when we switched to strongbox security system on our servers.

Maybe you should contact them and ask since this is a very annoying problem.

Have a great day!