PHP and Video for registered member

smilinarmadillo

Project : Website that offers diverse tutorials (videos and images). Video on demand type of project

Problem : How to limit the acces of video to members only?

Hi all,

I working on a paysite project that will offers tutorial videos.

I would like to know how should i proceed and what factors i should consider for broadcasting video on demand to my members.

I have built a CMS for the website. Withing that CMS there is a section for the tutorial videos. I store all the video in a DB mysql table. And retrieve them using php.

I would like to how can i check to see that the user is registered member before viewing the video?

And is there a way using PHP that i can verify that the video was broadcast succesfully?

Here there any php function for those purpose?

Since i wasnt familiar with Video, i did some search and reading on the net and from what i have read,

To control the user-end experience with the video, i should embed the video within the page which should prevent the member of saving the video on his computer. Is that true?

Now this raises concerns, by embeding the video within the page, will this increase the weight of the whole page?

does a steaming video has to be embedded within a webpage, or it doesnt matter and you can broadcast a streaming video in a pop_up window, player or web brower ?

Any help, advise or reference URL would be appreciated.

Thanks

Smilin

subnormal

I'll go ahead and address your first question regarding members only access to videos. What you are describing translates into the concept of "Sessions", which allows for the tranfer of data accross multiple pages. With sessions, you can force users to submit a login and password and then grant access to subsequent pages based upon a match in a user table.

This topic has been covered so extensively and so well on this forum that I dare not reinvent the wheel here. So here is a link to the manual section dealing with sessions:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php

and I recommend that you run a query in this forum on "sessions" and that you simply spend some time going through them.

As for checking whether or not a video has been watched, I'll leave that to a more senior member.

-Cheers