Ways to hide video source

how do you go about hiding the source of the video file

[waverly911]

What methods can you use to keep viewers of your video from stealing it/downloading it from your site? I recently added videos to my site and have seen my traffic spike to almost double than last month and my adsense CTR more than double from under .69 to over 1.5%, but my adsense revenue per click has had a precipitous drop.

I know people like to know how to keep people from stealing photos. I want to know what are some of the ways to keep people from stealing videos. I have wmv files on my site. I don't like flv files because I don't want my videos to look like youtube's with the bloody awful compression. I like the higher quality of wmv although it uses more space and bandwith.

I want people to have a reason to come back (like return to see the videos over and over) and if all they are doing is visiting my site to steal the videos then my work isn't very productive -- at least not for me. I like the fact that people are spending more time on the site (yesterday one person spent over an 100 minutes on my site and another over 80 minutes).

Is hiding the location of the file even an option (you get that information when you right click the video)?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

[Samizdata]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

If your videos are publicly accessible on the web then you cannot stop people taking copies - you can make it a little harder for casual visitors, but no matter what you do it will still be possible for people to use screen capture software to make at copy.

Flash video (FLV) can easily be encoded at higher quality than YouTube uses, and is generally a much better option than WMV video, which has serious cross-platform issues.

[thecoalman]

I believe flv is mpeg4 variant like WMV?Not sure but if that is case side by side using the same bitrate and resolution they should be quite similar.

As mentioned there are cross platform issues with WMV but on the other hand series 9 will play on any windows machine that has Windows Media Player 6.4 or better installed which accounts for just about every win machine on the planet, that player can even be installed on win95. Cross platform issues it has but it can be played on the most machines without the user having to do anything or install anything.

As far as preventing download you can slow them down but you can't stop them. Best thng to do is put a watermark on it, other than that I've seen things like temp URL's mentioned that only work once etc. In the end though if someone wants to take it and they are determined they can. Besides screen capture utilities already mentioned that will result in some quality loss there are also "stream capture" utilities that will grab the source file itself.