Prevent Hotlinking

[vivpuri]

I am new to Adobe products, so not exactly sure if the Adobe Media Server suits
our needs. We are working towards an app that provides streaming mp3 music to
end users via a flash player. What we want to do is prevent users from getting
to know the url of the mp3 on our server. Is it possible to do that with the
Media Server?

(couple of hours of research proves .htaccess and likes are no good solution)

[jamesdjustice]

i don't know if this is made easier by Media Server, and i am not a coding
expert, but this is a tricky task you are trying to accomplish i think.. of
course the end-user can always view the 'Activity' log in his or her browser
and get the URI of the source file if it is being offered as a progressive
download. one possible solution (and again i don't really know the answer) is
to embed the MP3s into your SWF files and then set restrictive permissions
using Flash Professional CS3 disallowing re-importation of the SWFs... check
out the devnet center for security and media topics. of course embedding the
audio into the SWF is not the ideal solution... some serious coding and you
could use a couple of encryption libraries or Amazon S3's signed-URL feature to
time-limit (and individually sign) the access to the MP3 file(s). This would
provide a unique URI for access to the MP3 file upon each request for it, that
is signed and can expire in as little as 10 seconds.. that way the file cannot
really be downloaded as the access URI will expire as soon as the streaming has
begun.

complicated topic here that i know little about but i thought i would try and
help =)

JD

[Graeme Bull]

Flash Media Server does not show to the end user exactly where the MP3 file is.
Being that it is streaming the file with the FMS service it won't be actually
"serving" the file to the client, so they won't know where it is exactly coming
from. That's in relation to a web server which will give the path to the file
because the browser has to go retrieve it.