How do YOU protect your movie files from hotlinkers?
 

See topic :)

I've just spoken to my host and they said htaccess protection is pretty much useless. He mentioned something about cookie protection. What do you guys use to protect yourselves??

Why protect movies when you can give them away for free! :thumbsup

As long as it's not on the bandwidth I paid for :winkwink:

.htaccess has a cookie validator that has stopped most of my hotlinking problems.

Put your movie menu page in an .htaccess protected folder using Mod_rewrite

You have to use Javascript (or PHP) to set the cookie on the movie menu page, then put the movies in a different folder using .htaccess cookie protection.

Javascript to set cookie. (will need the begin and end script tags not posted because it doesn't show up)

SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript"
document.cookie = "id=valid; path=/"


.htaccess file text

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*yourdomain.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !(^|(.+;)*)id=valid(;.*|$)
RewriteRule /* http://www.yourdomain.com/ [R,L]

I just manually rename clips + change the HTMLs accordingly.

Sometimes have to do it 3 times a day, but this helps keeping off those .ru hotlinkers. Works! :thumbsup

Manually renaming clips and htmls would get yourself blacklisted everywhere, if you work on submitted galleries.

Very few sites still allow this, for the only courtesy that they rip off free webspace accounts and content instead of paying for their bandwidth (and content).

Anyways, the other suggestions are pretty good concerning the javascript + cookie solution, but unfortunatelly most sites have javascript or php banned for gallery submitting.

As a movie gallerymaker, i've been struggling with this problem for very expensive internities until someone could help me with a custom effective solution.

If seriously interested, check my sig.
Michael

We have a script for renaming. 2-3 times per hour it changes names of all our movies and pictures. It looks like "6596266453de23d99c7143.jpg" for example. Yes, it's paysite. As for our hosted galleries we do nothing but copyright images&clips.

Im definitely interested Michael, Andre told me to get a hold of you but I haven't seen you online on ICQ yet. Please contact me, 11915886, we spoke before so I might still be on your list :)

If you're submitting galleries, you're pretty much fuxored. You have to play by the tgp nazis rules.

For anything else, there's lots of ways to protect movies. I think the cookie/htaccess solution is pretty lame myself.

Our links are good for 45 minutes, and they change gracefully, so if you're on a page that's less than 45 minutes old, you'll always have a good link.

After 45 minutes the links 404 and they get redirected to wherever I want them to go. We make a decent amount of money when stupid people hotlink our movies. ;>

Cheers,
Backov