Streaming Video Products

[ahillworks]

Ok so I have searched but have not found a detail and simply answer to my issue. I have figured out how to stream swf videos as a product. My question is when a customer hits download and the video loads it does not have any buttons to stop, play, rewind ect... How can i get those options for a customer?

Thanks all the help is great.

[kiddo]

If you are simply providing the stream, wouldn't the customer have to choose what player to view it with?

Streaming video where you control the presentation and buttons usually means you also provide a custom flash player as well.

kinda like this:
http://www.laserdiscvault.com/index....age=page&id=63

Or maybe I misunderstand (happens a lot)

[ahillworks]

Yeah I tend to leave things out sorry. Ok when my customer clicks on Download after purchase the page automaticly redirects to the redirect link for the swf file the customer wants to watch. The video then loads and plays but there is no play, stop, pause options. How do i correct this. All I am doing is loading the swf files to my downloads folder which has been moved to protect its contents.

[kiddo]

When a customer buys access to one of your movie clips, are they just supposed to be able to watch it online or are they supposed to download it to their computer to keep and play whenever?

[ahillworks]

Just watch it via streaming. No download access to file. Only Watching. Thanks You for responding by the way.

[pasi]

I'm doing a site for a client now that wants to sell films in form of DVD and streaming video. I'm building an interface with a list of videos the customer has paid for (using the order database with order_status system to see which online films the customer has in it's collection).

So there will be a page with list of films, with a link to another custom page that implements a FLV player with secure streaming URL (done with a clever timestamp system, so that you can't download the film directly).

This will not use the zencarts way of handeling downloadable files etc, but a totally custom system.

[dcprod]

I'm a documentary filmmaker presently building a site that will, among other things, sell VOD of my content. As the site has the presentation components built in Flash Pro CS4 and I have done some research into on demand streaming servers I may be able to add some answers here but I also need to ask some questions.

First, some information about secure video streaming.

An FLVplayer component is added to a Flash document (page) with all the controls you wish it to have. It can either be hard-wired to a particular Flash video file (flv or f4v) or loaded by a variable in Actionscript 3. The document is compiled into a swf and then published within an HTML wrapper.

The Flash Video file resides on a Flash streaming server, your own or on a 3rd party site. (I played around with a demo account at Imediasee.com with excellent results - 960X540 30fps @ 1500mbps without dropped frames). The advantage of the Flash streaming server is that the video streams but never gets cached on the client machine which provides pretty good protection from it getting leeched.

To play the file one simply loads the HTML file (containing the SWF file, containing the FLVplayer) in your browser. Pushing the play button connects to the flv\f4v file on the streaming server the file begins to play. The FLVplayer controls can be as elaborate as you want - pause, stop, rewind, scrub, closed-captioned/subs, and full screen mode that with f4v's gets a hardware assist with just about any nVidia or ATI card made in the last 3 years.

So now my question:

I'm looking around for a shopping cart to integrate into my site. I've read a thread here where the author states he was able to point to an HTML file, with an integrated Flash player and play a Flash video residing in the same directory. That's not what I want to do as that file will be cached on the customers site. But if I do something very similar, point to the HTML file wrapping my swf, wrapping my FLVPlayer, and my FLV player points to a file on a remote Flash video streaming server it seems to me it should work in the exact same way without the vulnerability of local caching.

Can anyone hesitate a guess if my assumption might be correct? Before I install, test, and learn to configure Zen Cart I'd like to have a good idea.

Also, from my readings about Zen Cart it seems that downladable purchases are accessed from the client's accounts page. I suppose that and the time limit feature provide some protection against wide re-distribution but what I don't yet understand is how the link to the file is made unique so it can be made to time out.

Thanks, in advance for any informed answers.

David

[dcprod]

I found a tutorial that explains how the link is made unique by the Linux/unix "symlink" feature so that answers that question.

Anyone have an idea if my idea on streaming will work?

[DrByte]

I've read a thread here where the author states he was able to point to an HTML file, with an integrated Flash player and play a Flash video residing in the same directory. That's not what I want to do as that file will be cached on the customers site. But if I do something very similar, point to the HTML file wrapping my swf, wrapping my FLVPlayer, and my FLV player points to a file on a remote Flash video streaming server it seems to me it should work in the exact same way without the vulnerability of local caching.

Can anyone hesitate a guess if my assumption might be correct?

Yes, if the content is streamed from a different server and no caching takes place, then it would seem that your assumption is correct.
I'll admit though that I've never done exactly what you're asking about, so am not much help with the specifics.

[dcprod]

Thanks, I'll just have to give it a try. I'll install a local test of Zen Cart, build the shopping component, and proceed from there.

I guess that if it does work there's two ways it can be done:

1) Hard wire a Flash player on an HTML page for each file that will be streamed. That would be simple but seems rather a waste of space.

2) Code a passageway for a string variable (the name of the file to stream) from Zen Cart to a single HTML page with Flash player. I know there's I/O with swf files via XML and probably PHP but I haven't learned how to do that yet. And then how secure could that passageway be made to be? I've read that the HTML page can be made invisible by raising its directory level higher but what about the script that talks to it? Any opinion on that would be greatly appreciated.