Restricting Access to Video files by Domain

I needed this feature on an old project and used Vimeo to accomplish that.

I know you didn't list Vimeo as one of the options you explored, but if you are open to explore it, it has a lot of privacy related options.

Reference on whitelisting domains to a private video:

https://developer.vimeo.com/api/reference/videos#add_video_privacy_domain

Using their PHP client is just a method call, after uploading your video with their Client, and fetching the video ID from the response you just have to make this call:

use Vimeo\VImeo;

$vimeo->request("{$videoId}/privacy/domains/{$domain}", [], 'PUT');

Where $vimeo is an instance of theirs' PHP client object.

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Another option, if using S3, would be issuing temporarily signed URLs:

https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/filesystem#file-urls

(scroll to Temporary URLs section)

So when rendering a template you would create a temporary URL for the asset on S3 for a given time, maybe twice or three times the video length (in case user pauses it or internet connection is poor) and uses that as the <video> source

It won't restrict by domain, but at least would make it harder to harvest it on a later time.

The link above points to the Laravel Docs which exposes a high-level API to deal with S3, maybe using the AWS PHP Client there are more privacy options available, but you would need to check it out.

Also DO Spaces might allows a similar features, but I am not familiar with it.

Thanks, I'll check out the signed URL option. I did consider Vimeo, and still might, but I'd like to have one place for the mp3's & mp4's, You can't upload mp3's to vimeo.

thanks!

You're welcome.

On the project I used it I didn't need to handle audio-only files, so I wasn't aware of that.

If you come up with a nice solution, please share it.

Have a nice day!

After half a day of searching, This is gonna take more time than I have for this project, just gonna go the vimeo route for now. From reading several blogs and post on here, i get the feeling that what I come up with, may not completely restrict the access the way that Vimeo can. (Gonna use Cloudinary for the audio files).

I'm gonna do more research and tinkering as time permits, If I come up with something I'll post here

thanks!

You're welcome =)

Thanks for providing a feedback on your findings. Good luck and have a nice week