Has anyone had any experience integrating amember pro with amazon s3 for storage? I'm working on a membership site that will be hosting some very large HD videos, and Amazon's S3 data plans are so much cheaper than hosting solutions I've found. Is it possible to setup protected file links with amazon s3 and amember?
Hi Jasonbcil, Is your issue the storage space or the bandwidth? I've tried to integrate with amazon in the past without success as there was no way to instruct Amazon to check back to see if the user has access. While I toyed around with some streaming services, etc. I ended up upgrading my storage on my server to host the content, but caching it via http://www.pantherexpress.com which does check for access through aMember before transferring.
You can also use a service like www.ezs3.com or use javascript to hide the URL, http://www.bmyers.com/public/1266.cfm David
David, Have you integrated with ezs3 before? While it suggests the notion of "authenticated", it appears to be a proprietary users database?
No, but some members of my site have and have emailed me that it works well. I'm not familiar with the details of how it works David
The thing I find nice about Panther is that they check back to the protected source directory of the file. If the customer is logged into your amember site the request will automatically start downloading or streaming the file from Panther's cache server. If the customer is not logged into your amember site they will be prompted to login and then start downloading or streaming. This was a blessing for me for one project where the business sold video podcasts. Due to the size of the file they wanted it as close to the customers as possible (hence using a distributed cache solution) but also wanted the security of amember protection.
Great, thanks for the feedback guys, yeah, I'm going to be delivering hour long full HD videos, so they're going to be pretty big. Skippy, I'm going to to check into Panther, that looks like it could be a good solution. I also found a decent wordpress plugin that generates S3 expiring URLs, and since that's what I'm going to be integrating my amember install with I'll let you guys know if I find any decent solutions there. cheers!
EZS3 - Amember and Amazon Hi, I have personally used all 3 and found that by using a protected folder and the EZS3 script given it works pretty well and you can also lock the video to your domain with them too to stop theft. The only downside is that you will have to cough up $20 a month for the service. An alternative I also use is flv-producer pro or webvideowizard - both of these allow you to input the external video file that amazon s3 gives you and again whop them into your protected webpage. The only dif is that you will have to upload the video skin to the same file as the webpage housing the video - voila!
ezs3 user I like ezs3.com allot. I've been using it for a while and not that you can integrate the cloud service, you can get pretty fast streaming times. It would be pretty simple to have a protected site and then embed the S3 players anywhere you want. You were wondering how it works, and you just create a folder on S3 where you upload your videos and S3 can create players to embed the video. That's why I chose it. Good Luck.
I'm not familiar with ezs3.com. From looking at their site it is not entirely clear what they bring to the table above and beyond a friendly UI to manage your S3 instances and playlist management? Given the number of free solutions for managing s3 solutions (such as s3safe for example) and plenty of free playlist generators out there for the JWPlayer it makes it tough to justify the $20/mo. Keep in mind: 1) Your content is not actually protected, the path is just obfuscated. A user with a bit of tech savvy or a firefox plugin can locate the actual path of your content and have access to all of your content unrestricted and / or sharing the path with others. Without tight monitoring of bandwidth you would have no idea this is happening. Locking to a domain does not provide much security as it is just referral checking which can be easily spoofed. 2) While better than a standard hosting plan where all of your files are on a single server, S3 is not a distributed solution in that your content is served from one of a small number of datacenters as opposed to a global replication of your content serving your content as close to your customers as possible. This means single points of failure and/or slow transfer speeds. 3) Cost wise, you pay for s3 whether you have any users or not. You pay to upload, you pay monthly to store, you pay to download. When you add it up it really adds up. Even something like DreamHost ($6/mo with unlimited storage and bandwidth) for your data (perhaps coupled with aMember remote plugin to protect) is a better solution IMO, especially given S3's track record of outages. I think S3 is a great solution, but not for protected content being served to anonymous users. Until Amazon updates their API to allow manipulation of users so that you can programatically add/remove/update/authenticate (which it does not seem to be the case anytime soon), linking or direct url streaming of content from it seems to risky.
Hi skippybosco Not wanting to do a sales pitch.. but to share my thinking.. and how the service has evolved. (eZs3 is a membership site too.. and like everyone here, we have to provide a service that's worth more than the money charged for subscription ) ... eZs3.. a mini history! I head up the UK support for another membership platform. Couple of years back we got repeated requests to help put video onto Amazon S3 and into the membership site We got fed up of doing it one-at-a-time.. so built a solution.. this grew into a membership site Our initial objective was to make using S3 easier for the site owners (for us too!) We were charging a lot more to do it 'bespoke' - but subscription was based on on the time saved using the Zs3 service Also, during the bespoke set-ups, the site owners generally had a team of VAs who did all the uploading, player creation and embedding etc.. so we had to provide multiple secure-access to an S3 account. As we work with membership site owners - the obfuscation and 'lock-to-url' scripts were included from the get-go And, site owners wanted to use media for marketing their sites - not just the training for members So we enabled the hyperlink overlay - for audio and video - for affiliate marketing or directing to a sign-up form After that, we were asked for stats.. to help site owners know who's watching what (for example, some site owners have a pitch video and provide it to affiliates - who embed it.. and the site owner can see the views / track the conversions in their aff prog and can fine-tune the video for the affiliates' audience) This last month we finished the CloudFront integration - making it as easy as we could! As you know this makes the viewer experience a lot better / smoother ------ Perhaps the biggest hassle of moving from one host/software platform to another is moving all the media. Knowing this, when I set up eZs3 I made it so you have to have your own Amazon s3 account.. making any future moves to any other subscription platform painless...as you can re-deploy your media quickly and easily ------ As you can't prevent piracy, we focus on stopping theft of bandwidth (with Cnaming, lock-to-url and obfuscation of the script) ------ Amazon don't charge bandwidth if you don't have any viewers - only hosting.. it's the fairest set-up I've seen. Especially when using videos for marketing.. no traffic.. no charge.. lots of traffic.. well at 17c per gig you've got some playroom for conversions! As you 'own' the script.. you can turn the tap off if you wish.. by updating the player ------ Anyone here would need their own JW player license - the new owners at LongTailVideo are much more... commercial Our players are fully licensed ------ Having done all that.. and because we are immersed in the continuity marketplace.. we are now able to do the really sexy stuff! TomC Founder of eZs3.com PS I guess I should put this post on my site somewhere!
TomC, Seriously, thanks for the background. For those that need the service, glad there is the option. While all of the other means of obfuscation I've seen have been fairly trivial to overcome, I'll take a look at the CNaming solution and see how well it holds up. ps. great looking site btw.
You can also check out http://jvideo.infinovision.com/ It supports full permission modeling for different levels of video, and is hosted on S3. Their branded player is free for up to 100 videos. OVer 100, you can get a custom branded solution for a fee. also good guys, and good player.