FLV Hotlink Protection

I’ve had several of my hosted .flv videos hotlinked from a Chinese website and it’s eating up bandwidth and dragging my server down like crazy. Is there any reliable, stable solution to protect hotlinking of .flv videos? Any scripts (will buy if it’s a good, established solution)? Or is there a chance to have .htaccess modified to reliably prevent .flv hotlinking?

 

you can disable sites whit .htaccess but they always can use proxy sites.

So best for you to use some of free tube scripts that already have PHP base hotlink protection.

 

Well you could just block China in your firewall and problem solved, unless your targeting these demographic of people

 

Just block China and indeed half the world that only causes problems and contributes nothing to the internet community.

 

Move the FLVs into a non-web accessible directory (or add a .htaccess file blocking it from external access)
Next wrap the FLV output in PHP doing something like:-

<?php
$filename="/path/to/your/file.flv";
$yourdomain = "yourdomain.com";
if (stristr($yourdomain, $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]) || $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]=="")
{
header("Content-type: video/flv");
echo file_get_contents($filename);
}
else
die ("You are not allowed to access this file");
?>

Then point the FLV player SWF at the PHP file instead of the FLV file.

If you want to do pseudo streaming you'll need to use something like xmoov.com (free) but that requires using yamdi (also free) to inject metadata into your FLV files.

HTH

 

Great post ! Thank you.