What's best way to conserve bandwidth?
 

I have movies files at 500mb each. In addition to the hotlink protection via .htaccess.. what else can I do to conserve bandwidth consumption?

How can I cut down the file size without breaking it up into smaller clips?

well how well did you compress them. What length are the 500MB "movies"

I haven't done anything to them yet.. & they're 35 minutes each

The size of the movie file depends on the codec used to encode it and the bitrate. The higher the bitrate the larger the resolution, if you scale down the bitrate a bit you will get more maneagable filesizes, but you will sacrifice a bit of clarity. You can encode it in several different bitrates till you find the combination of filesize and resolution that you think would work best for your surfers.

In regards to protecting your movie files there are several movie anti-hotlinking protections available, because standard .htaccess rewrite rules wont work because alot of browsers do not pass referrer information when requesting video files.

We offer one free of charge to our customers at realitychecknetwork.com. If you have any other questions feel free to hit me up on icq at 36837470. :thumbsup

People can not hotlink out of the members area.....