How to prevent Cloudfront downloads via IDM (or other video download managers)?

#1

I’m setting up a video membership site using s2member (free) and Amazon S3+Cloudfront. I was able to configure the basic options and my videos are now playing smoothly with JW Player over RTMP. The only glaring loophole is that the stream is downloadable via Internet Download Manager (IDM), which gives me an option to “Download this video”. And the downloaded video works perfectly.

Is there any simple way to prevent this? I haven’t tested this with other video download managers but if it’s so easy to use IDM to get access to the videos, that defeats the whole purpose of setting up a paid membership site. Could someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong?

Thanks for reading!

#2

What you’re asking for is impossible without DRM. See this: https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/17174/how-to-prevent-users-from-downloading-videos

#3

I understand that even the best DRM solution can’t prevent certain people from getting videos from streaming sites, but IDM makes it easy for the average user to get the videos :frowning: So is there nothing I can do in this case without implementing a complex DRM solution?

#4

No. That’s the point. If a browser can access something, a browser can store it. That’s the way the web works.

The only things you can do are (a) to make that less obvious so that ordinary users don’t realize (which is part of the point of RTMP) and (b) encrypt the download so that it is unusable without the decryption key (which is what DRM does).

1 Like
#5

Thanks for your quick responses! I’ll see if I can implement a DRM solution for the site.