unimr.red5.protectedvod 0.1rc1-r96721

Introduction

unimr.red5.protectedvod implements a video-on-demand (vod) or audio-on-demand solution for secure flash streaming with Red5 server. It provides a way to protect your media files from being directly downloaded from Plone or from being “leeched” by other sites. For this purpose the streaming URL is secured by altering the requested URL with a signature. When the video/audio file is requested, the path of the file is individually signed by Plone for each request and the streaming is delegated to Red5. Red5 checks afterwards the signature of the incoming request for validity by a shared secret (only known by Plone and Red5!). If the signature is valid Red5 delivers the stream. The signature is unique, context specific and its duration of validity is limited. Plone’s security context is therefore completely preserved in Red5. Nobody can copy-and-paste that URL anywhere he want and load the video.

Installation

Example Archetype

The included Archetype Red5Stream integrates the GPL version of flowplayer with Plone 3.x. It can play video files (FLV, H.246, MP4) as well as audio files (MP3). Clients with “view” permission can only view the content by the streaming technique of Red5 but cannot directly download the content. Per default only clients with owner or manager role have the “Download Red5Stream” permission to download the content from Plone.

Signature & streaming URL

The dynamically signed streaming URL takes the following format:

rtmp://<red5_hostname>/protectedVOD/<baseUrl>/<signature>/<expires>/<streamName>

The parts of this URL are as follows:

• baseURL is determined based on the relative path of the video/audio content in the FileSystemStorage.

• signature is calculated as follows: hmac.new(shared_secret + baseUrl + streamName + client ip + expires).hexdigest() where shared_secret is specified in Plone’s configuration and should match the value on the red5 server.

• expires is a timestamp given as a hex string. This is the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 in hexadecimal notation plus the the ttl configured in Plone portal_properties.

• streamName is the name of the video file, for example, Extremists.flv, flowplayer.flv, or rocknroll.mp4.

Red5 application

This package includes the corresponding Red5 application protectedVOD as WAR-archive (also a tgz-Archive of the java sources; s. README.txt in red5-wabapp directory of this product for further information). Don’t forget to change/synchronize the shared secret in both Plone’s and Red5’s configuration!

Requisites

• Support for symbolic links for the used file system

• FileSystemStorage (iw.fss)

• Red5 server (v0.8.x)

Credits

• Andreas Gabriel <gabriel _at_ hrz.uni-marburg.de>

• David Nax <naxd _at_ hrz.uni-marburg.de>

TODO

• clustering implementation

• collective.flowplayer integration

Changelog

0.1 (xxxx-xx-xx)

• Initial release