I am hosting some embedded streaming flash videos on my website. They copyright for the source DVDs belong to an acquaintance of mine, and the agreement for hosting them on my website is just that they have to be protected to prevent downloads. What are some ways of doing this? It doesnt have to be something that would stop a determined hacker, or anything -- just something to prevent people from downloading them with their little plugins/'hacks'/real player 11, etc.
Thats a tough one, I think that if someone has a "little plugin or hack" then they are determined enough . There are ways to do it but I am not sure how they work. Are you going to stream the whole thing? You could use the streaming as viral marketing, and show shorter segments, with a watermark and at a lower resolution, even offer it free for download in a 3gp format for phones, or a low quality mp4 for Ipods to get people viewing and talking about it, and have a link to purchase the full length DVD or purchase a high quality full length version for download at itunes somewhere on the page. You may get a few sales for your mate If that is no good then there are ways to protect it (sort of) I think Adobe offer something called streaming server or something like that, not sure how much it costs but you could look in to it. Also If you wanted to you could upload it to google video and embed it in your site.. its low quality, with Google video you can set it to private so that people browsing Google video won't find it, and you can also opt to not have it available for download. I haven't tried to download a video of Google video for ages so I am not sure how hard it is now days.. anyway hope that helps, if not I am sure someone else knows of a way. Cheers James