Poche

Hello, everybody!

As known, Flash Player is always copying swf file from I-net before playing it. But how can we load flash movies directly from any source without usage of temporary files to protect this swf from any other outside access?

Elysia

I highly doubt it downloads it before playing.
No, it streams the file. In other words, it downloads pieces of information which is stored into memory, decoded and played back. No temporary files...

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Poche

Flash video do copy, here is the link

Cactus_Hugger

And so what if you do? If it comes across an HTTP stream, I can still mimic that same HTTP request (or simply eavesdrop on the real HTTP request), and store that. Strip the HTTP header, and done: I have the .flv file.
This is likely part of Flash itself, and there's probably not much you can do about it.

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matsp

Are you asking "how can I build a browser that doesn't store the content on the disk", or "can I make the web-server stop the browser from storing content on the disk"? If the latter, you can't - it's entirely up to the web-browser [and it's plug-ins] to decide how to store things.

You could probably, with a lot of effort produce a browser [or browser plug-in] that doesn't store the data in a file.

Of course, neither solution is really effective against someone who really wants the content, as it still passes from your server to the local machine in some way, and that means that someone with a packet sniffer can reconstruct the content and store it somewhere, and then do whatever it is you are trying to prevent (e.g. play it again without paying, redistribute it elsewhere, etc). It may make it a bit harder than just copying files, but it's not rocket science.

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Elysia

Flash does not copy the video. The browser stores a cached version of it.
If you don't want that - you need to disable the browser's cache.
You can never really protect something that's publically accessible from the outside. Even if I disabled my cache, I could just use a http proxy debugger to find out the http request to get the movie.

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I dedicated my life to helping others. This is only a small sample of what they said:
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Quoted... at least once.

matsp

Or set up another machine to be http-proxy and cache the files!

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Poche

I’m trying to build an app, which should have a control (let’s call it Flash Video Player), which plays FLV from server (certain URL). If you trying to use some Flash Player ActiveX, you can find that for Flash Player ActiveX you have to save the movie to a temporary location to load it and play, isn’t it? You'll have to create a corresponding link that you can pass to the Flash Player ActiveX and then delete the movie after it is played. Of course you can’t guarantee high security level , but I think it’s good, if at least no temporary files are created. So the question is how to make Flash Player ActiveX be able to load flash movies directly from any source without temp files?

sean

Not to sound discouraging, but you can expect YouTube to have looked into this pretty thoroughly. Even so, you can get plugin's that break their copy protection in 2 seconds. With a bit of knowledge, you can do it by hand in under a minute.

IIRC, temporary files aren't all that playable by themselves - I think the browser usually modifies them in someway, but I could be wrong. I'd be more worried about someone decompiling your controls (or viewing the source in any other way) and sending a direct HTTP request for the SWF. You could configure your server to not respond to an HTTP request for the SWF unless the request comes from your other control, and it comes very soon after the other control is downloaded.

Poche

Useful advice, thanks

Poche

I think F-IN-BOX is the solution . It is able to load movies directly to the ActiveX thereby avoiding the temporary file step, protecting movies from unauthorized access.
And Flash Video Player ActiveX ‘s DLL protection from decompiling can be implemented by BoxedApp Packer – discussed in “Protection of DLLs” thread.