Protecting the video - EXAMPLE

[ClickBuster]

Hey Opti!

There was a small problem with this thing, which made me drop it. The general reason for this script to be written was that the movie players are not sending ref URL, which is why people can't protect them with regular .htaccess (you probably know that is the easy way to protect picture content from hotlinking).

What is good in that case is that the script WILL protect your videos from beeing hotlinked, BUT won't play them directly in the Media player. Now if you make sure that the browser won't try to open the file directly in Windows Media Player for instance and instead ask where to save the file - you're all good to go with that script. However, many link lists won't like this and you may not get listed, unless people know what you're doing there and support you

I would suggest using the sciprt WITH an explanation text, explaining that due the site's policy blah blah blah, THE SURFER HAVE TO DOWNLOAD the movie, before watching it

Now to make sure that your browser won't try to STREAM the movie, make sure it's not sent in application/octet-stream format, but it should be a binary format THAT the USER can't open directly (for instance, if you say that is a binary file that should be opened by JURU-MURU software, you're OK). However, there's a big chance that the BROWSER will try to open the file with a media player, BECAUSE the file extention is .wmv or .mpg for instance. So as a conclusion, the TEXT varsion, with the "First download, then watch" explanation would be your best choice.

Andrew

PS
Don't be so impressed, it's really not a big deal

PSS
This increse your server's CPU time with a less than 1% (I can't say 0% and I can't estimate the exact number, which is very small)