Just be careful, apples have worms

I know, I remember grainy 8mm movies when I was a teen. Ahhh, those WEREN'T the days. But I do like to listen to vinyl LP's on a turntable every now and then.

Wow i learned something in this thread... I did not know that wmvs could not be hotlink protected...the russians have been eating my ass the last few days.

The more I search I am not sure you guys are right about this one...

I'm blocking .wmv hotlinking via .htaccess. |bananna|

Give me a URL of a site with .wmv's and I'll try it

http://www.lottoporn.net/big-tit-pat...07/movie10.wmv

It should 404 on you. I posted it on the bottom of the site in my sig and it seems to be working fine from here. There might be a way around it but I think this should stop the majority of it...|headbang|

I tried it and you're right, came up 404. Care to share how you did it? Everyone says it can't be done with .htaccess

Try again. http://www.uselesswarrior.com/hot.html You can block a link, but not the embedding of the .wmv.

Btw, the URL is incorrect. It should be Movie with a capital M.

Shit you're right UW...It was the lack of the cap M that was making it 404! Damn I thought I found something there. You say that you can block the hotlink? How to with .htaccess? Still blocking the hotlink is going to cut down on a lot of loss...

:( I know your pain.

With .htaccess, someone can't link directly to the .wmv and bypass your page. That's why we get your little replacement image when we click a direct link to http://www.lottoporn.net/big-tit-pat...07/Movie10.wmv But since referral info isn't being sent by the embedded player, .htaccess can't stop the .wmv from being pulled onto someone else's page. It's definaltely wise to have .wmv on your anti-hotlink rule so surfers won't post direct-to-movie links on their forums and such. If they want to share your movies with their free loading pals, they'll have to put a link to your gallery. Most surfer forums, I'd imagine, won't enable HTML so that a surfer could embed a movie file within a post. Of course, there are many other cocksuckers out there to worry about.

I'm going to pull your links out of my little test page now. |thumb

You really pissed in my beer! I thought I had the best thing since sliced bread ;-) Anyway I suppose just plugging up the holes of image and wmv hotlinking while redirecting bad referring URLs is about the best that can be done. From my server logs today it is pretty decent and I was actually paid a little bit instead of it costing me in terms of bandwidth usage. I suppose you could go with the mpeg but you would only gain a few percent of Mac users and almost double your file size. It would take alot of smart embedders to overcome the savings from wmv I think plus you have to consider the increased load placed on your server by the larger mpegs. Thanks for bursting my bubble :-)

Macs have always played wmv files but the player from Microsoft was hideous.

These days Flip4Mac, which is free, allows QuickTime to play wmv files so unless you look at the file you don't even know if it is a wmv or something else.

The format that I would really like to use is mpeg-4 (.mp4) but Windows users don't seem to like this format.

[quote=Cleo;326986]Macs have always played wmv files but the player from Microsoft was hideous. QUOTE]


I guess the support just has not been native then. Personally I like QuickTime about as much as RealPlayer. They both like to pop-up at you and live in your tray. I'm not a fan of MS but just very used to it...If it were up to me everything would be open source. With your comments Cleo I can see even less reason to consider using mpegs...

I've heard other Windows users say this as well. On a Mac QuickTime is just another application that doesn't do anything unless you actually use it for something but then Macs don't have a tray or pop messages up.

But QuickTime does get installed as part of iTunes and since the iPod has become such a huge success I'm guessing that these days QuickTime is common on PCs these days.

On the paysites that I manage we use mpeg-1 files since it seems to be the only format that gives us zero problems with members.

Long time lurker, first time poster... :)

Don't know if this is OT or what, but have used MPlayer encoding with some success. At least regarding mpg -> "lighter format" conversions.
http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_.../encoding.html

Concerning the hot-linking can't you just use a directive like:


SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "[MYDOMAIN\.]" local_ref=1

Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=local_ref

Hey UW can you try me again? I have a server side hotlink protection on now but I think someone is getting through it... eating my bandwidth like a kid in a candy store

update...I removed my .htaccess hotlink protection early this am thinking it would speed up my server a bit since I was supposedly protected by LinkSentinel. Well it left me wide open. One IP had taken up more bandwidth than a Hun listing...literally because I have one today so it was like having two. No wonder my server was on the sluggish side...

use the total video converter
search the torrent network with exact these words and download that
it is just 9 mb in size .

How doe one actually know that someone is hotlinking files?

Your server logs should tell the tale. Your bandwidth will shoot up to excessive levels. Depending on the quality and accuracy of your server stats you might be able to pinpoint who is doing it. I first noticed I had referrers with a low number of hits but a large amount of transfer. You can use HTaccess to stop much of it but I haven't been able to get it to stop direct accesses of .wmv files. I can help you with the HTaccess if you want.

I'm using Windows Movie Maker to grab some 20 sec. clips from a 15 min. video but when I try to import the vid I get an error message that the video isn't indexed and can't be imported. Some videos import fine, some give me this error message. How do I get them indexed?

I had the same thing happen before... Is the hard disc or partition that you are downloading to close to full? I can't recall if that was my problem but it seems like it happened when my partition was near full. If so clean up and re-download... hope this might help

I have 126 Gigs of free space but I'll delete the vids and re-download. |confused|

i just can't recall exactly what my issue was...try to download a different video and see if it will work. maybe the dl is corrupt

I found a message board that said when videos aren't indexed to download Windows Media Encoder here:
(Something to do with new codecs |confused| )
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...r/default.mspx

I downloaded it, double clicked it and it installed. But I can't find it and don't know how to run it. I double click the .exe file again and it installs again. What am I doing wrong? The downloaded file is named
wvc1dmo.exe but I don't know where the installed program is |confused| HELP! :D

Not sure if this will help anyone but I got the solution. After the above is installed, click Start, then "all programs" and find Windows Media, then "Utilities". In Utilities, click Media File Editor, click File and find the video you want to re-index. Once it's loaded, click File again and click "Save And Index". You're done.