Free WordPress Plugin - Protect your Videos and Downloads

[rlpruitt]

I've had this concern for quite a few weeks... finally got it licked!

I use WordPress for my membership sites and use a plugin that I wrote (Micro-Membership) to take care of the membership aspects (signups, security, content protection, etc.)

One of my membership sites has videos that I paid for and:

1. I didn't want people to have access to them that shouldn't have access
2. I didn't want anyone that does have access to abuse the links (share them with people they shouldn't)
3. I didn't want my members to download my videos - not because I didn't want them to have them, but because what I really want is for them to return to my site so I can maintain an active, interactive relationship with them

Problem #1 was solved by my Micro-Membership plugin. I almost solved problems 2 & 3 with Amazon's Simple Storage Services (S3). Not only is S3 a great platform for streaming video but it allows you to protect your content with access control lists (ACLs). They've implemented "Query String Authentication" which lets you add information to the end of your links that Amazon uses to verify authorization. The links can also be time-limited so that they expire after a given period of time.

The concept was great. Unfortunately, the implementation left me less than whelmed - mainly because the "extra characters" Amazon S3 uses for authentication just knock the cr@p out of most FLV players.

Fortunately, I've found a combination of a WordPress FLV player plugin (Hana FLV player) and a modified security plugin (Amazon S3 URL Generator) that seems to do the trick.

So, I thought I'd share my "secret" with my Warrior buddies.

Here's a video that I put together (very quickly)
to show this combo in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt4k2ZpBK9I

The Hana FLV plugin is bundled with 4 FLV players with licenses that allow them to be used commercially. (Not so with the popular JW FLV Player)

The combination of FlowPlayer V2 from the group and the Amazon S3 URL Generator works GREAT!

However, the Amazon S3 URL Generator needed some modifications to:

• support PHP versions older than 5.2 or support PHP installations that don't provide the hash_hmac function (sorry... programmer talk)
• support subdirectories in the Amazon S3 bucket
• provide the special encoding that allows some FLV players require to work with S3's Query String Autorization

You can download this plugin here:

Amazon S3 URL Generator (Mod)

No need to go to the website like it says in the video. However, I will be adding support info to that site for the Amazon S3 URL Generator (as I make enhancements) and for Micro-Membership - so you may want to go there and register for a free account.

THIS IS NOT A FINISHED PRODUCT!! So there's no official support. However, I'm using this on my site AND I'm working on upgrades and enhancements. So, if something's not working please PM me and I'll see if we can get it resolved.

Enjoy!

Ralph