Help - Bandwidth Protection

Protection against Hotlinking, Streaming, Leeching, etc..

[Willis]

For starters let me say, if this is in the wrong location I appologize. Please feel free to move it where it should be, but let me know ;)

On a small website a friend of mine operates, she has video files ( MB's ranging from 10->240 ) of RM or AVI format. Now she does a decent amount of work making certain her Bandwidth does not die on her, or more to the point go past and charge extra money. . but it feels like extra work considering over 80% of the bandwidth must be coming from people not even participating in the group . . aka people are leeching from her.

Right now we're looking for anything to help, from a quick fix to a full working system. So any advice is helpfull.

However, for litteral requests for help, I suppose here are my two biggest question. What can she do to at least stop streaming the video? For those who do not realize Streaming is when you click on the "open" button instead of the "save" button. Whenever a person watches the video over and over, he/she downloads it all over, meaning instead of maybe 200 MB bandwidth, the person could have chewed up 600-800 MB.

My other question involves logging. At one time or another, also what I was making reference to by "a full working system", she wants to have a system which ties the forum members to the downloads. Essentialy if you are not on the forum list you can not download. But also the amount you as a user download, is limited.

In the mean time what my request is, is how can she, if possible, log down the amount of bandwidth an individual file has taken up, accurately bandwidth, not number of requests.

Either way, whatever advice you got I'm greatfull to hear it. I do understand PHP to a degree and know OF htaccess (not familiar with it however). So plz give any advice possible.

[AVGuy]

I would suggest that your friend use a Java A/V streaming application as 94% of the Internet is java enabled. I have 2 gig of video on my site and have absolutly no problem with bandwidth theft. The video can only be acceessed from a direct visit to the domain. Even if the streaming files are downloaded they cannot be viewed from any other website. You can further secure your video or audio streams by encoding a security ID that will protect your media from any attempt to download and view it unless you were logged into, and viewing from the domain eg www.[yourdomain].com.

Further, the video or audio does not require any player to be viewed so there is nothing to download or other executable to run in order to view your content. You can insert your video into your page and have it play in the browser without any pop up window covering your content. Since it is java based, there are a number of java instruction you can implement for tracking (when it was played, wehn it was stopped, the domain accessing it, etc). Video and/or just audio encodes very easily and quickly giving you the option to encode at specific bandwidths or varialbe bandwidths. The viewer's bandwidth is measured and tested for sustainable rate and video is delivered at that rate.

I was totally blown away when I first saw this technology and immediatly implemented it on my websites over a year ago. It is with true passion that I speak of this as it has really changed the way that I do Internet Marketing and on-line education.

You can Stickymail me any time and I will provide you with more details of who they are. I do not want to advertise any company's product (although there is but one provider of this type of technology that has the depth and scope to make a secure difference in your web offering).