How to make videos secure online

[thehipgurusguide]

from reading the manual, I understand the email video download link is encrypted.

for the actual video uploaded to my site – how is that protected from random search and download? or is that not possible?

or would I put them inside the wp membership plugin?

thanks

[wzp]

If you desire the best security possible, consider hosting your videos on Amazon S3, and use our Lightbox Ultimate plugin to embed the videos on your WP site and securely show them to your customers.

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-lightbox-ultimate-plugin-display-media-in-a-fancy-lightbox-overlay-3163?ap_id=TheAssurer

You’d then use eStore’s APR feature to create protected pay per view (PPV) pages so only a paid customer can access the video. More explanation on this feature here:

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/ecommerce/using-wordpress-permalinks-as-digital-products-apr-1217

This will provide the best solution to your security concerns.

[thehipgurusguide]

Many thanks – Amazon S3 is new to me so I will read up on it.

Meantime, as a middle option, if I store the video on my site, will the membership software offer some basic protection?

[wzp]

Yes, self hosting under eMember will offer “basic protection.”

Emember is a “Discretionary Access Control (DAC)” plugin. It only permit groups of users to access your content, who you want to grant access to. It will NOT protect you from users who are “hell bent” on defeating your security.

Amazon S3 (under Lightbox Ultimate) uses “Mandatory Access Control (MAC)” to ensure that only a specific person, under specific circumstances can access your video content.

Using Amazon S3 also has the benefit of relieving the stress from your server, because the content will be streamed or downloaded from Amazon, not your server. The first year of Amazon S3 service is free; and customers have been reporting an average cost of less than 15 cents a month, thereafter.

[thehipgurusguide]

ok way cool WZP-

the long term costs is what I was not clear on –

definitely I’ll go with S3.

two followups

1. does S3 accept .avi files? Ive been trying to upload an avi movie but it keeps failing. What file type do you suggest? avi is half the size of mp4 so that’s why I was thinking it is quicker to download, and the quality is still decent.

2. can you recommend an encryption software for movies (eg, avi, mp4, mov) so when it is downloaded it cant be mass produced or played on other’s computers – etc. something like that.

[wzp]

1. does S3 accept .avi files?

Amazon S3 is a storage medium. It will accept any type of file format. If you are having problems uploading to your bucket, it might be caused by things like the object key (file) name used:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingMetadata.html

Bucket (Folder) names also have their own set of restrictions:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/BucketRestrictions.html

What file type do you suggest? avi is half the size of mp4 so that’s why I was thinking it is quicker to download

AVI is a proprietary Microsoft format. MP4 is more universally acceptable. As for download speed; Amazon S3 uses the same servers that Netflix uses (Netflix is an Amazon customer), so it should not matter if the files are in MP4 format.

2. can you recommend an encryption software for movies (eg, avi, mp4, mov) so when it is downloaded it cant be mass produced or played on other’s computers – etc. something like that.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is beyond the scope of our products. DRM and anti-DRM can be an expensive arms-race (for you) to get into.

[admin]

You should definitely use MP4 format for your videos. This will ensure that your videos are playable on almost all devices.

[thehipgurusguide]

thanks I’ll use mp4

ive tried uploading mp4 to S3 many times in chrome, firefox and safari because one of the threads said only chrome works. It takes between 1-7 hours for an upload to reach around 70% then it says fails to upload.

then I added a support query in their forum but got no answer.

not sure how to proceed from here.

maybe I’ll just use youtube and protect the page

any thoughts?

thanks

[wzp]

How large is the file, and what kind of Internet connection do you have?

[thehipgurusguide]

492MB – I have tried dsl at home and then went to the library for faster service

[wzp]

I suspect your Internet connection is slow and that Amazon is just timing out on you.

• Do a speedtest.net run to determine what your upload speed is.
• Divide the upload speed, which is bits per second, by 10. This gives you the upload speed, in bytes per second.
• Divide (492*1,024,000) by the bytes per second upload speed.
• Divide the answer by 60 to find out how many minutes it should take to upload the file.

Also, your connection at the library might be “throttled,” if the library’s network detects you are performing a large file transfer. One of my clients is a school, and I programmed its network to automagically reduce the bandwidth of students who try using BitTorrent to 56kbps <evil-grin>

[thehipgurusguide]

Thanks, I will divide the video into sections to see if that helps.

[Author]

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