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Hotlinking and bandwidth Stealing - Is there a way in PHP?

Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 2:26 am
by hiranthadhanuka
I cuurently have an issue with the content I'm publishing via my site (PHP based). I use a FLV player where the URL of the file is picked up from another server by using an absolute URL.

Eg:-
so.addVariable("vdo", escape('<?php echo $allServ['server']; ?>content/video/<?php echo $allVidRows['video_file'] ?>'));
(so.addVariable is just a method supported by a third party FLV player called GDD FLV player..and we only need to provide the path of the FLV file..)

server IP and the video file will be queried via a standard SQL from the database and it finally renders the absolute URL
so.addVariable("vdo", escape('http://111.111.111.19/content/video/myvid.flv'));

The biggest problem with this approach is hot linking has become a habit and they are stealing my bandwidth 'cos the final rendering of the content location is just an absolute URL.

I have had tried many things (including .htaccess hotlinkng prevension .. etc etc).

So my question is, is there any other way to overcome this situation via a PHP solution? maybe encoding the URL or anything like that?.