I am building a site similar to www.purevolume.com. The users should be able to upload MP3 files and set if the file only can be streamed or streamed and downloaded.

Visitors to the site don't have to login to listen to music. They should be able to stream/download these MP3 songs depending on the users settings.

Ofcourse, I will not have a download link if the song can't be downloaded, but this is not enough to protect the songs from being downloaded. Depending on what player I am using there are several ways of knowing the MP3 file location. The easiest way is to use a tool like IEwatch to se all the traffic from server to client while you stream the song and then just use that to download the song.

Using the Flash Media Server might be able to prevent this somehow, but that media is way to expensive.

Is there any way I can prevent this or is this the wrong forum?

My plans regarding OS/Web server is
Website on Apache and Windows Media Server as streaming server.
Is it reliable to stream from the Apache webserver if there are thousands of concurrent users? Or do I need to use WMS, FMS or other?

2006-02-25 Retitled by g0n, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'Stream MP3 but prevent user from downloading'


In reply to (OT) Stream MP3 but prevent user from downloading by boboson

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.