Publishing protected videos online.. how to???

Question

Dear All,

as many of us is aware is possible to dowload youtube videos using AnyVideo converter or any similar software. The basic mechanism is that, when bufering a video, a set of images is sent to the client machine, that's because youtube videos are in flash format. Not sure which format, .f4v, 4fp . I assume is .f4v rather than .4fp as the video can be dowloaded.

Parts of me would argue that is impossible to make a totally protected video. Every time you see a video the stream is dowloaded in the local machine and thus with a software reading the steram and converting it to mp4 or either other format it should be possible to copy the video.

Another part of me says that technically this could be avoided by: 1 - having a video which uses an encrypted file format 2 - creating a client application that accesses to the encrypted file format in order to show the video

But here again, it has the risk that someone generates a software using the same encryption client to then do the same of what AnyVideo and similar does.

At least it would reduce the risk though..

Any solutions? I need to make a video available online only to a restricted set of people and we want to eliminate (ideally) the risk of other people accessing to the video.

Many thanks,

pengCC

ps: a related question redirects me to this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/286270/how-to-password-protect-streaming-videos-with-php

Basically their approach is to use a password protected quicktime video.. do you think that AnyVideo or any other software will still be able to copy the video?

Answer 1

Theoretically it is possbile to encrypt the stream using a password, in such a way that it is not possible to decrypt it. You would use symmetrical encryption for this.

However, why don't you simple password-protect the page which displays the video? Wouldn't this be enough?

Answer 2

I guess a password protected page should be enough, because if someone who has rightfully access to the videos wants to cough "share" cough them, it won't make a difference if just the page is protected or the whole video.

I think most sites(e.g. Peepcode) run fine with Account protection, but it heavily depends on your audience and if you want to charge for the videos.

You could add a Watermark though, in order to keep people from stealing your credit.

Now, some crazy thoughts of mine on how to protect the video at all costs!!!(Read: The following is sarcasm)

1. Proprietary Plugin Stuff
Create your own streaming format and use a Flash front-end for viewing. Now, don't allow skimming, only play the video forward. Also only buffer a small amount of video.

Problem: Someone might reverse engineer your front-end and then just grab the playing video out of ram.

2. DRM
You know, the kind of DRM which forces you to view the video on DRM enabled hardware etc. Of course this means that your videos must be really, really awesome! Something like... teaching people how to fly! Otherwise nobody will watch them because nobody has or wants to buy the hardware :P

3. Become an ISP
First step here is to buy an ISP of your choice, then sign secret agreements with your government which allow you to scan all your traffic in real time(or just do it without permission :P). Now you can force the people to subscribe in order to view the videos. In the last step you monitor all the upload in order to protect against sharing. If somebody uploads the video, just send the Professionals...

Oh, and you might want to monitor the good old mail traffic too! Just in case someone builds up a network of CD Video distribution!

Or even better get rid of the CDs altogether and install scanning software on all USB Storage devices in order to protect against those ones too. Or... just sign a deal with Apple, so the iPhone is the only thing you can store stuff onto that's left on the whole planet! Uh.. hard-drives? Don't worry we invent some new ridiculous annoying screws that nobody can unscrew... and we forbid the use of CnC machines...

And if everything goes wrong you can still destroy earth: http://qntm.org/destroy