How to make embeded videos only available to a specific player

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to make an embedded video only readable by a specific player. Here's the context:

I have a website that hosts videos for streaming. All videos are private. My clients would like to be able to generate an embedding code snippet that would allow him to post this video to whichever site he desires. (ultimately this means that the video stream is no longer private but now made public).

Now this is the tricky part. The client does not want these videos to be scannable via their URLs, meaning that if the video url is http://my.domain.com/videoToken, any bots/users/programs hitting that URL will not see the video, however the player needs to load the video from that same URL.

Anyone know what secure options I have for implementing this? There are some DRM solutions out there, are those of any help for this use case?

Thanks in advance.

PS: if this is not possible for whatever reason, what's the next closest thing?

Answer 1

What if we put something similar to the following on a .htacces file?

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?my.domain\.com/.*$ [NC]
 RewriteRule .*\.(mp4|avi)$ http://www.my.domain.com/forbidden.mp4 [R,NC,L]
 # or serve a standard 403 forbidden error page
 # RewriteRule .*\.(mp4|avi)$ - [F,L]
</ifModule>

Maybe that's not the solution, but the idea of use mod_rewrite to control access to video on an HTTP_REFERER basis could be developed.