Protecting Video from Download

eenusa

Is there a way to protect posted videos from download? Not only do I see a Download/Real Player pop up at the top of the clip when it starts playing, but there is a share button at the end.

Daddio

eenusa wrote:

Is there a way to protect posted videos from download? Not only do I see a Download/Real Player pop up at the top of the clip when it starts playing, but there is a share button at the end.

Why has there been no response to this question? IS there a way to protect videos from download?

cmason

cant you just turn off external links and turn off the 'easy sharing' in your gallery customization, like you can do for photos?

Andy

Daddio wrote:

Why has there been no response to this question? IS there a way to protect videos from download?

Because the question was missed, Sorry. We answer all questions at our helpdesk, without fail Once in a while, a question gets by us, and the community, here on Dgrin.

Videos are delivered to your computer - they are in the visitor's browser cache -there's no way to show the vids without that

Power and pro customers can use CSS to block the 'save movie' links on the flyout if they wish.

darryl

Andy wrote:

Videos are delivered to your computer - they are in the visitor's browser cache -there's no way to show the vids without that

The same exact thing can be said for photos. Yet you still enable Power and Pro customers to easily disable the "Save Movie" button.

Power and pro customers can use CSS to block the 'save movie' links on the flyout if they wish.

Power and Pro customers have a "Right-click protection" option. Although not documented, this also blocks the "Save Photo" link on the flyout.

It seems logical that this setting should apply to videos as well.

Re: eenusa's original query:

The Real Player Download pop-up is a function of that plug-in. You can't prevent users from browsing your SmugMug site with that plug-in or any other plug-in that makes downloading videos easy.

The Share button at the end of the video does not apparently respect the gallery settings for Easy Sharing or External Links. Again, it seems logical that the Share button would not appear if "Easy Sharing" was turned off. Likewise, it seems like the Embed links should go away if you've turned off "External Links".

I think people just want video protections to be "as good" as photo protections. I know that all the kids using MySpace and Facebook know how to get around these protections, but it seems that you should at least offer the same facade of "security" for video as you do for photos. :-}

lifeinfocus

Use Watermark in the Meantime
My partner and I are strongly considering developing a site using Smugmug. We are focusing entirely on developing multimedia shows - video. So this topic is of concern to us.

I uploaded a short sample video to Smugmug as a test and downloaded it with Real Player - piece of cake. It converted it to a mpeg 4 format. A customer could easily burn DVDs.

Obviously this would be a problem for us to post client videos on the site prior to payment. So in the interim until an easier solution is developed we will have to include a watermark and copyright statement on every screen. Unfortunately the watermark would have to be annoying enough that a client will not download it anyway and ignore a mild hindrance.

I don't believe this will be a problem for sample videos because any downloads could be good advertisement.

Any thoughts are most welcome.

Phil