Protecting video files

[J. Landman Gay]

sims wrote:
> I have two groups of video files, each contains 115 videos which
> are approx. 30 seconds each. One batch is .wmv and the other
> is QT 7 H.264.
> 
> I'd like to protect these from being tampered with, ideally make
> them playable only through my application which uses a player
> object that references them.
> 
> Anyone have suggestions?

I'm working on something similar right now. What I did was place each 
video file into a stack as a custom property. When it is time to play 
the video, I write the custom property out to a temporary file with a 
non-descript name in the "temporary items" folder, then I set the 
filename of a player object to the temporary file. When the movie is 
done, I delete the temporary file. Every time I change videos, I use the 
same temporary file name. That way if something happens and one of them 
is left on disk, the next video just overwrites it.

Writing a custom property to a file on disk is very fast. I was 
concerned at first that it would cause too much lag, but Rev has written 
17-20 meg files to disk in under a second. That was quite acceptable for 
my purposes.

This method isn't iron-clad, but if the video-storage stacks have a 
password set, it is difficult to differentiate and separate the movie 
content from the rest of the stack. And because the temporary file is 
written to a usually-invisible folder, and deleted immediately when not 
in use, I think only the very dedicated would be able to find and copy it.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com