Sure, you can embed a YouTube video on any site, but the content ultimately must come from their server. What technology(ies) do they have that prevents us from saving/redistributing content?
From a protocol standpoint, you would think that anything that comes over the wire could be saved. I hope I am not the only guy on Earth who does not know how to "save" a YouTube video...
There are a couple of plugins for Firefox out there that let you save the content. Basically it parses the sourcecode and looks for the videofile (either .flv or .mp4) and downloads that directly. The flash player on the page just plays the supplied file. They could of course obfuscate the path to the video file, but that can be reverse engineered as well. They can't really do anything about it, because the video file has to be on the user's computer at some point, or if not, the stream could be intercepted as well.
eg. https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/6584/?src=api
Mostly it's a legal deterrent rather than technical. There are a plethora of programs out there that will allow you to download their video. But there are two things they do that help reduce unauthorized downloads:
Use is flash to control the download and playback.
Hosting video yourself is not cheap, and thus it's much easier to simply leave the video on youtube.
They don't do anything about it. Very likely your Flash viewer downloads a copy and puts in somewhere on your harddrive (under my Linux system with Firefox and Adobe Flash in /tmp). After you are done viewing the file is removed to save disk space, but since it is on your harddrive nothing prevents you from making a copy elsewhere.
You might want to look at the 'analogue hole', in the end, data still has to be displayed on your screen, or get through your speakers and what not. It's always theoretically possible to intercept it at that point, or even just record your audio-out into another machine.
So as far as the analogue hole goes, the only solution is to skip that, in this form:
(source: thisdomainisirrelevant.net)
Which is not that marketable.
Related
I am trying to compress a video for wordpress, as each time I open up my webpage the video barely loads and then freezes. How should I go about compressing the video (I have already zipped it and used a program, but at 324kb it still seems too large). I have heard something about changing the bitrate, is this helpful/how can I do that? I would like to keep it in an mp4 if possible.
The only way to change the bit-rate of a video file is to re-encode it. There are plenty of software that are capable of doing so, my favorite being avidemux which is free and reliable.
Open your file in the app, choose an encoding & a bit-rate, hit "save video" and you're good to go.
You might have to try a few different bit-rates until you get a file that will both load fast and look good on you website.
Be sure to always use the highest-quality source file available for the re-encoding operation, since re-encoding your video will always result in a decrease of your video's quality.
I am in the middle of an application that has a module to play videos from a directory on the same web-server. Everything is fine, except for the point that, while video is streaming, if I try to drag the player tip to an intermediate point, it either drags back to where it was(in flex player) or keeps loading un-till the video actually approaches that point(in case of jw-player or html5 player) or does nothing(in some other online players available). My client wants to be able to play or start buffering from any desirable point. I read something about RTMP to be used for such thing, but wasnt able to find a direct guide over how to do it.
Help appreciated!
If you're talking about being able to load a video file from x seconds in to the video, you should look into http pseudo-streaming. Here's a link to the jwplayer page about it: jwplayer pseudo-streaming
How can we protect our image being copied from our web site?
Can we disable copying image content from our website or any?
You cannot stop an image from being downloaded from your web site. If this image is visible somehow on the site it means that clients already have it. You could add watermarks to the original to claim copyright. Some other techniques might involve incorporating the image into a Flash movie which would make it harder but not impossible to retrieve.
IMHO clearly stating copyright ownership of the images somewhere on your site should be enough.
You cannot protect your images from copying. You can add watermark or some other artefact to it to discourage people from copying it, but you cannot prevent it (if you want it to be shown on your webpage, it is publicly available).
You may find this article as useful: Your images are a virus. They are EVERYWHERE on the Internet
You can't prevent image copying from your website, if it is served to the clients' browsers it can be copied.
"User saw your images" means, he/she have already downloaded to his computer. But maybe you could put some trick to block users who are not advance on computer usage.
For example;
Disabling right click with javascript etc. (Not block us but blocks someones :) ) as described
You can try using a script and a transparent Gif or PNG overlay that is positioned over the image.
If the user back click they would end up with a blank image instead. This can be a little frustrating for them, and can sometimes be a bit difficult to figure out.
This may offer some low level help, unless the person is using a screen capture tool.
Is there any good control or plug-in for uploading multiple photos with preview? As far as I understand it is impossible to preview photo on local computer using just JavaScript. So it has to use Flash or Java.
Thanks, also, I use ASP.NET.
Wait, do you mean show it in a browser window before starting the upload? So does the file have a URI? (Hint: file:///c/users/public/somefile.png is a URI) You can always just link it into an image tag on their browser session.
Now, will a browser let you link a file:/// for image? That I've not tried, but you should; at least you'll learn something from it when you do try.
But using this, there's no reason you can't use a lightbox style image viewer with the local URI.
You could also make use of silverlight 4. If you're looking for something already written you might try using the upload control from gallery which much require some hackery or if you have money to burn then telerik have an upload control but I don't believe it supports previews. This http://www.aurigma.com/Products/ImageUploader/ also looks nifty.
I wonder why no browser out there has such simple but essential feature. Am I missing something? Is there a technical reason?
I'm tired of all those javascript/flash/java hacks out there ...
There is no technical reason preventing the browser from calculating the total bytes to be sent and then tracking how many have been received by the server (Thanks, Kibbee for your comment). Firefox had a functional upload progress indicator until version 0.9, but that build broke it in 2004.
Reading through the Bugzilla updates, it seems that this feature doesn't seem to benefit enough users to get any traction from the developers.
Users who regularly upload very large files tend to use tools like FTP that are designed for this purpose, so they are not affected.
Adding to flamingLogos argument, you might operate behind a proxy which takes your five megabytes of pure goodness within a second, and then sends it off to the server over a 56kbit modem.
I perceive a wrong progress bar slightly worse than no progress bar at all, and there would be many people for who it would be wrong all of the time.
Yes, it's silly, and for some reason browser makers are ignoring it.
I would strongly dispute that large file users use FTP - hardly anyone knows about that anymore and all the common Web apps require HTTP uploads for video, audio and pictures (e.g. youtube).
Ironic that user participation and media is the key to Web 2.0, yet the main mechanism for user participation is so poorly handled by browsers.
For Firefox there have been bugs languishing for years, such as for a better upload progress display:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468
Get voting! :)
The existing progress bar in the status bar is broken for years - see bug 249338 - and it will let you silently abort an upload - see bug 432768.
If you are using Firefox, you can use the new UploadProgress add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/221510/ designed for this purpose, that is displaying the progress of your uploads and an estimated remaining time.
You have to post back to upload a file, regardless of whether or not you are being "sneaky" about it (using hidden iframes, for example); the browser's own progress bar (usually down in the status bar) is the file upload progress bar in that sense, although not exactly.
It's just that you can't easily use that data for yourself, so you have to approximate it with a lot of client-to-server communication tricks.
There's no real technical reason you couldn't have a reasonable progress indicator as you do with downloads. You should suggest it as a feature request to your favorite browser.
That said, I think the main reason there are so many javascript/flash/ajax-based upload components isn't so much to provide progress bars (though that's a nice bonus). It's usually because they want to provide a better UI for selecting the data to be uploaded and to sometimes manipulate the data before uploading. The basic file upload feature that's in the HTML specs results in the "Browse..." button that pops up a file open dialog and uploads the raw file data as is to the server.
Chrome has an upload bar that shows the % of loading.
Or, like Peuchele says, there's also an Addon for Firefox.
The web browser has always been that, a browser of the web. It is a mechanism for consumption. Our ability to upload information through the same portal is somewhat of a hack.