How to protect amazon s3 media files from download

So if they're in the UK, then the data is served to them from the data center closest to them in the UK, even though the source file is in the Ohio data center. And that file is cached in the local "edge" network the very first time, and from that point, all UK visitors will get the file quickly delivered from their nearest edge location. The image above on the left shows you how the users from different countries will be accessing your files if you are just using Amazon S3 alone.

And the image on the right shows you how your media is accessed by those same users from those same locations, except, this time you have CloudFront enabled. So Amazon CloudFront is an additional layer that sits on top of your Amazon S3 bucket, and speeds up the delivery of the media in your S3 bucket. The image on the left above, shows that your Amazon S3 bucket is a single location stored in the cloud, and when visitors to your website from all over the world try to access a video, audio, pdf or other media stored in that S3 bucket, they are still served those files from that one central location.

And from that point onwards, every US person who tries to access that video, will be served that video from the local cloud, and not from the S3 bucket. A CDN is basically a cloud "network". So this network still needs the files to be stored somewhere, preferably on a high-availability "hard-disk in the cloud".

And that's what S3 is. And to give you a quick peek behind what's involved, creating true-streaming videos involves the use of a secure and scalable "hard disk in the cloud" - aka, Amazon S3. Then you need to convert this "regular" video explained further below into a "stream".

So a regular mp4 video file is chopped up into smaller "segments" and delivered piece-by-piece, in real-time. And to do this, you need a cloud-based service that will do this "chopping up" - aka Amazon MediaConvert. So you basically need S3, CloudFront and MediaConvert in order to store, create and securely deliver a streaming video. And S3MediaVault. For you, it's as simple as selecting a video file from your WordPress Admin panel the S3MediaVault settings page , click on a link that says "Prepare for Streaming", then S3MediaVault will create a streaming video player for that file.

Just embed the code on any page on your WordPress site, and you're done. But progressive downloads can increase the costs for the video service, and here's how: As soon as the viewer hits "Play" on the video, the video starts to download to their computer in whatever the "temp" folder of the browser is, where it stores all temporary internet files.

Now even if the viewer hit "Pause" right after they hit "Play", the video will still continue to download, until it is fully downloaded. So if it's a big file, then the entire file of tens or hundreds of MB's of data is downloaded to their device first, whether it's their computer or their mobile device. And regardless of whether they end up watching 1 minute of the video, or just a few minutes, or even a fraction of the video, the video was downloaded in full to their device.

That means, the video provider in this case, you, and your S3 account ended up delivering the entire video, even though they may or may not watch it, or only watch it partially. So more bandwidth cost for you, the provider. And for the viewer as well, their internet bandwidth is used to download the full video, even though they may or may not watch it, or only watch it partially.

So more bandwidth cost for your viewer as well. And especially more so if they're on a mobile device and are using their data and have a limited data plan. And that's where "Streaming Video" is much more beneficial to everyone involved - well, almost to everyone involved, which I'll explain in a minute. And that's because with streaming video, the video is delivered as a "watch as you go" stream of data.

The video provider - in this case, Amazon MediaConvert - converts the long, single. These have the extension ". And there could be tens or hundreds or thousands of such segments depending on how long the video is.

And those segments are delivered one by one to the viewer's device, as they continue to watch the video. But if the viewer hits Pause on the video player, then the segments will stop being downloaded.

So only the bare-minimum amount of video data is delivered to the viewer, as need, as they continue to watch. And that ends up saving you - the provider - money in terms of bandwidth costs; and also reduces the viewer's data usage as the consumer. But there are two small downsides to streaming:. And that would result in the video freezing up every few minutes while the downloading of the segments catches up to their viewing.

But with progressive downloads, those who have poor internet access speeds, will be able to hit Play on the video, then hit Pause, and come back in however long, and the video would continue to download the whole time they're away from their device, because that's what progressively downloading means. But you can't do that with streaming where you can Play, Pause and come back later to a fully downloaded video, because the video doesn't download full with streaming.

So if you want regular "progressive download video", you need just Amazon S3, and you get possibly slightly higher bandwidth costs because the video is fully downloaded to the viewer's device regardless of how much of it they watch. So the addition of CloudFront and MediaConvert increases your costs slightly, but you could also end up saving a little bit on the bandwidth costs, because only as much of the video is necessary, is delivered to the viewer's device.

S3MediaVault uses Amazon AWS MediaConvert service to create the streaming version of your mp4 and then delivers that to your viewer, and makes it really easy and manage everything from within WordPress without having to log in to AWS or know any of the technical stuff behind creating a streaming video. No, you can't install WordPress on Amazon S3.

S3 is not an alternative to using a webhost like SiteGround or LiquidWeb those are the two I use and recommend, after having tried out a whole bunch of different hosts over the year. S3 is more like Google Drive or Dropbox oversimplifying, of course. You can see more details here. In this video, I'll just focus on Videos, which are easily the most popular and powerful form of content in an online course.

If you just upload a bunch of files to S3, and those files never get downloaded regardless of file type , then you'll be paying for just storage.

But if you embed those files in your member's area using a plugin like S3MediaVault. If you're thinking about storing the files on your own website, don't read this to see why.

The good news is that the cost of S3 is really low. Amazon has a pricing calculator , but it can be a bit confusing. So here's you a rough idea. This is for Video, as that's usually the main kind of content in most online courses. Also, S3 has tiered pricing, so costs won't necessarily go up directly in proportion to increased usage.

So if you want one single, integrated, easy-to-use solution for securing and delivering all of your premium content and media files, at a really low cost, then a combination of Amazon S3 and S3MediaVault. Google is obsessed with speed and since they've included page speed as a signal in their search algorithms.

So by speeding up the load time of your pages, you can improve your position in search results, driving more organic traffic to your site, and increasing conversions and sales.

You can even pause and resume. You can bulk select files and choose to copy them to cloud storage, remove them from cloud storage, or copy them back to the server from cloud storage.

Or maybe you have a membership site and need to protect members-only videos and other content? WP Offload Media allows you to set up Amazon CloudFront to serve some files in your bucket to the public while other files are protected and only served to signed-in users.

We also have a tool to quietly remove all offloaded media files from the server in the background to free up storage space. Removed all the offloaded media files from your server? No scripts or command line needed. Need to copy your offloaded media to a new bucket on the same cloud storage provider? WP Offload Media can easily copy your media from one bucket to another within the same cloud storage provider.

Files are copied quietly in the background. Already have your site's media in the cloud? So, in this blog post, I will share with you some of the best courses that I found.

These courses wi About Me. Close Menu. Posts Open Menu. Share this post. Post written by Abhishek Sharma. But wait Open the S3 console Click on the bucket from which you want to download the file Select all the files which you want to download and click on Open. Look at the picture below. I guess there is a limit in Chrome and it will only download 6 files at once. Download single file To download a single file follow the below steps - Open the S3 console Click on the bucket from which you want to download the file Select the file that you want to download and click on the download button Using the AWS CLI Note - If you are wondering, let me tell you that you do not need to specify any region in the below commands.

Conclusion I believe this post helped you solve your problem. Thank you and keep learning. AWS types of services You can adjust all of your cookie settings by navigating the tabs on the left hand side. Functional Cookies Functional Cookies should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. Enable or Disable Cookies. Analytics Cookies This website uses: Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.

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