delivering large flash videos PW protected

[mickthetree]

Hi All

I have a customer who wants to sell access to videos of conferences he runs.

Each video is about 1hr - 1 1/2 hrs long. I have ripped these from DVDs using format factory and they stand at about 380(ish) MB each.

There are 12 videos for each event and about 8 events per year.

Videos will be available to watch on a password protected webpage.

First issue - the site hosting company only allow uploads up to 150MB per file.

Can I host the flash videos elsewhere and deliver them through the password protected web page without anyone else being able to see them via the hosting server?

This would also reduce the bandwidth going through his site.

Second issue - how much of the code for delivering the flash do I hold in the database? do I hold everything between and including the object tags? or just hold the file name and drop that into the object code and repeat the region for the number of records held?

Really appreciate any advice on this.

[EastCoast]

>>First issue - the site hosting company only allow uploads up to 150MB per file.

You're going to need probably 500kbps for reasonable quality, so say 90mins x 4mb per minute = a lot more than 150mb.

>>Can I host the flash videos elsewhere and deliver them through the password protected web page without anyone else being able to see them via the hosting server?

You can certainly use external hosting for the .flv, but If the video hosting isn't password protected then somebody could extract the flv url from the swf player and then access it directly.

>>Second issue - how much of the code for delivering the flash do I hold in the database?

Can't see what the point of repeating the same object code in multiple records is? Surely you'd only store the bare minimum unique data per record?