Prevent HTML5 video from being downloaded (right-click saved)?

Question

How can I disable \"Save Video As...\" from a browser\'s right-click menu to prevent clients from downloading a video?

Are there more complete solutions that prevent

Answer 1

Yes, you can do this in three steps:

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1. Place the files you want to protect in a subdirectory of the directory where your code is running.

   www.foo.com/player.html
   www.foo.com/videos/video.mp4
   

2. Save a file in that subdirectory named ".htaccess" and add the lines below.

   www.foo.com/videos/.htaccess

   #Contents of .htaccess
   
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://foo.com/.*$ [NC]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.foo.com/.*$ [NC]
   RewriteRule .(mp4|mp3|avi)$ - [F]
   

Now the source link is useless, but we still need to make sure any user attempting to download the file cannot be directly served the file.

3. For a more complete solution, now serve the video with a flash player (or html canvas) and never link to the video directly. To just remove the right click menu, add to your HTML:

The Result:

www.foo.com/player.html will correctly play video, but if you visit www.foo.com/videos/video.mp4:

Error Code 403: FORBIDDEN

This will work for direct download, cURL, hotlinking, you name it.

This is a complete answer to the two questions asked and not an answer to the question: "can I stop a user from downloading a video they have already downloaded."