Can the RealPlayer plugin be circumvented?

Question

I'm wondering if anyone knows how to definitively stop the RealPlayer plugin from allowing a user to download videos.

So I work for a company that streams video learning for members. Most our videos are available to paying customers, and all are copyright of my company.

So the new version of RealPlayer has a streaming video downloader integrated into it, so if you're on a webpage with a video, the RealPlayer download window pops up and gives you the option to download the video. In webkit the .mp4 is downloaded and in FireFox (and the RealPlayer browser) the .flv version is downloaded.

So far my code is this:

(function(){
   var pluginArray = navigator.plugins;
   var ua = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/536.26.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) RealPlayer/12.0.1.1750'

   for ( var i = 0; i < pluginArray.length; i++ ) {

      // check to see if the plugin is installed
      if ( pluginArray[i].description === "RealPlayer Plugin" )
      {
         console.log( pluginArray[i].description + ' is installed.' );

         //checks to see if you're using the RealPlayer browser
         var re1='.*?'; // Non-greedy match on filler
         var re2='(RealPlayer)';  // Word 1

         var p = new RegExp( re1 + re2, ["i"] );
         var m = p.exec( ua );

         if ( m != null )
         {
            console.log( 'You are using the RealPlayer Browser' )
         }
      }
   }
})();

With this logic, I'm open to suggestions on what to do next. Ideally, we don't want to totally block the content because most our users probably aren't downloading the videos, but for the ones that are, we want to stop it. Is there anyway to prevent this?

Answer 1

It looks like wmv encoding and backchannel multicasting are your friends here:

Helix Server supports RTMPS and HTTPS for secure content delivery and can support the distribution of Windows Media DRM protected content. Helix Security Manager can also be used to secure access to content URLs over RTSP/udp/multicast traffic.

Helix Server supports the ability to multicast content using scalable multicasting (true broadcast over IP) or using back-channel multicast (content is broadcast over multicast but there is a control connection always open to the server for authentication).

With scalable multicasting there is no protection method as the content is available to any device that can play it back on the network however backchannel multicast can be protected. Back channel multicast however is only possible with RealMedia content played in the RealPlayer.

References

• Does Helix support content protection and access control

• Helix Proxy Config Guide: Backchannel Multicasting

• Helix Support Guide - Realnetworks (pdf)