Flash movie management

[largerabbit]

Hi,
Here's my scenario....
Have about 30 training videos (in flv format) They are mostly small (< 1 min). I want to allow certain web sites to put them on their pages and track their usage.
I could get a custom flv player that takes communicates with a db server to log views etc, but it seems a bit insecure. Anyone could decompile the swf and mess around with the db calls.

Any strategies for dealing with this sort of scenario? Is this something that needs to be built into the web/streaming server?

Thanks for any ideas!

[sneakyimp]

Unless you are actually *streaming* the videos to a player, there's nothing to stop anyone from simply checking their cache for your flv files. Regardless of whether you are streaming your videos or simply serving up flv files from a webserver, you should always know when someone has requested a file. Just check your webserver access logs.

Have you considered giving a different URL to each of your clients? You could use a PHP page as a proxy. For instance, for client #1, you could give them this url:

http://yourdomain.com/training_videos.php?client_id=1&movie_id=23

Your PHP page could take a peek at the client_id (which is 1), the movie_id (which is 23), and would also have visibility to the IP from which the request came as well as a variety of other information. If the IP and client_id don't match, then you can deny access or something. Admittedly, the IP and other information can be spoofed, but it's better than nothing.

The PHP page could first make a note of the request by entering a record in a DB and then could send headers telling whoever asked to expect a FLV file. It would then finally barf up the FLV file.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?