How to Prevent Video to Download

I am using Jwplayer to play video in my website.

I want to secure my video and just want that users can watch those videos and want to prevent them to download those.

Even I am using signatures with my azure storage videos and bits on run videos. I am generating signature for 10 seconds and did experience that in real player downloader I can download videos.. so when video started to download its downloading completed to 100% though the signature of video is expired.

So How could I can secure my video?

Plz help

Thanks Dalvir

Solution

As Filburt already commented, it is not possible to prevent downloading of your videos. When somebody watches it, it's downloaded already.

A few thoughts around your options to try and protect videos:

As you say, you can restrict your users to download a video in a limited timeframe. This may deter the least experienced or determined user, but is practically useless.
You could add referer header checks, which are still useless, and will also only deter few people that really wanted your videos. But at least a minimal knowledge of the HTTP protocol would be needed to download files.
This option is theoretical, you shouldn't do this, just for the brain exercise and to highlight the difficulty or your problem. You could serve videos in a file format that only your player can play. Of course you would have to implement your own player then. This would still not prevent downloading of your video, but downloaded files would not play for your users without your player. Of course a user could either use your player with the downloaded video, or transcode the downloaded file to a known format. Both of these are either cumbersome or complex, so I think it protects against more users. But it is still not secure.

Note that whatever you did, a user could still record your video with screen capture while watching it, rendering any protection useless. When somebody watches it, they already have it.

So the bottomline is, you can't protect your videos, given the constraint that it is a website and the client is a browser, and even with different constraints it would be very difficult. Consider the DVD market. They couldn't even solve their similar problem when they controlled the hardware, and movies are a huge business.