Hello everyone,

I was just going through the apache logs for the quicktime server and I just thought I'd remind everyone that it is strictly prohibited to link to the QT files themselves that reside on the Studentfilms.com QT server.

If you are giving a link to someone so that they can view a film it MUST be the link that appears when you click on the Broadband or Modem versions of your film or on the film page itself.

For example:

http://www.studentfilms.com/film/get.do?id=408

or

http://www.studentfilms.com/film/view/play.do?id=563

Otherwise, you are robbing Studentfilms.com of precious bandwidth if you are not viewing the films on the site the way that they are meant to be seen.

Linking directly to the QT files robs the site of advertising revenue, bandwidth, and the possibility of people watching the films to see films by other filmmakers on the site.

Please do not link to files directly on the QT server. Only link to the respective film page urls on the main Studentfilms.com server. Linking to the QT server directly is strictly prohibited.

Thank you for understanding.

Best Regards,
Chris Wright
Studentfilms.com

Hey Chris,

I had the exact same problem on one of my Video Hosting servers and coded a solution that allows people to ONLY view the videos in their browser. It allows for the viewing of several formats of video, so if things get worse just PM me and I can help you out.

I operate several web servers & am a webmaster too, so that is how I gained this knowledge.

You can also disable deeplinking or hotlinking through c-panel or which ever admin panel you use. That would solve the problem pretty easily.

Deeplinking? I've never heard that term before.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

It's called hot linking more often I think. Disabling it makes it so no other servers can use files on your server.

Then you have a "white list" of servers that CAN use your files, so you'd add the regular studentfilms servers to those

Ahh...that's neat. I'll look into that.

-Chris
Studentfilms.com

Yah hotlinking protection in Cpanel shoudl work fine.

HOWEVER, People can still load the movies directly from the source into Quicktime even with hotlinking enabled.

My website had this problem, so I used some sessions tracks to only allows viewers access

Wow - I had no idea you could bypass it that way. Interesting.

Well, thing is with hotlinking people "include" it in the page where as direct linking people are technically accessing your page/server, but they bypass all of the advertising and such.

My website FilePub.com was losing 100/GB/Day at one point when the problem got really bad, stopped it and now its gone entirely.