wmv and .htaccess - Please Help!

Hi all,

I’ve managed to successfully embedded wmv files on to my pages and they appear to play as they are downloading but as soon as I place a .htaccess file the wmvs won’t load.

I have the following in the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mydomain.com/

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.myavs.com/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://myavs.com/

RewriteRule .* http://mydomain.com/re-direct.htm

I would appreciate any help I can get as I want to be able to protect my members directory and at the same time have my videos load. I have tried to follow a few guides from other forums but to confusing for me.

Thanks

this is a problem that i ran into a couple of years ago.

here is why it isn't working: windows media player doesn't pass the HTTP_REFERER through, so basically when the movie plays, this value is lost

solutions:

1. the best solution is to get rid of mod_rewrite and the HTTP_REFERER check. use .htaccess with Basic Authentication

2. the 2nd solution that i came up with a couple of years back is to:

A. move all of your videos to a non-web visible folder on your server
B. create a small script in your members area that records the customers IP address
C. have another script (web visible), that reads in the wmv file, verifies the IP address (from the script in part B), and then pushes the video back out.

you will need to have a great deal of technical knowledge or programming experience to do #2.

good luck!