Best way to stream video on restricted page?

I am using s2Member to restrict pages that I will have a series of videos on. I will use the “specific posts/pages” restriction feature to allow visitors to pay to access the videos individually.

The problem I am currently facing is that I’m not sure of the easiest way to stop those videos from being downloadable.

I am assuming that hosting them on any video streaming website will never work, so is my only option to have the video files in my hosting account and stream them directly from there using html5 and fallbacks?

I saw a tutorial on the website: Hiding the Address of Protected Video Files

So that will help if I do it that way.

I’m basically just looking for any suggestions as to the best way to protect my videos. Converting them to three different formats and making sure they work on all browers is time consuming, so if there is any easier way I’d love to hear it.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Kesava

Kesava, i have a whole site with video tutorials that are hidden behind membership. I am using Custom capabilities to protect the pages. I am using Easy Video Player 2 (it is not free though) and once configured, it hosts the videos on Amazons3 and it is VERY inexpensive (i dont think i have paid more than $2/month since i started, last year).

I think there is another way to do it, but it can be problematic with bigger files. I have workshops that are 50 minutes long on Amazons3 and no problem. The videos are not downloadable unless i want to, in which case i offer a different link for the user.

Cassel,

Thanks for replying.

The videos I have will be maybe 8 – 10 minutes a lot of the time and I may only have 10 in total, so I am trying to find a simple, inexpensive way to do it. I checked out EVP2 and it does look awesome, but since I have very few videos, I don’t mind doing a little extra work to get them up.

I can upload them to my hosting server and they will be protected by s2member, so I just have to try and stream them in an effective way.

http://www.s2member.com/kb/hiding-the-address-of-protected-video-files/

In that tutorial it shows how you can remove the fallbacks to hide the url from the source code. But surely removing those fallbacks will stop the videos from streaming across many different browsers and definitely on many mobile devices since it uses flash.

Can I have the video files in the s2member protected directory, and stream them like it says in that tutorial?

I would suggest you test it. I never used it because i prefered using EVP2, as i have over 100 videos and the workflow is soooooooo easy with EVP, i just didn’t want to tweak with the protected folder.