I have a asp.net website that shows users' videos and also controls them via JavaScript. I do this for their YouTube videos, and I also give users the option to have the video on their server. If its on their server, its of course not
a YouTube video and I use the HTML5 video tag to display it. If its on YouTube, I use the iframe (and associated API) to show it and control it.
But if people don't have a server to host it on, and they don't want to use YouTube, it seems that they should use Azure Media Services.
I'm new to this technology, so I have several questions to get myself started quickly:
1. Assuming some other person has mastered the problem of uploading a video to his Azure account, can I display that video in an HTML5 tag on my web-page, and manipulate it with JavaScript like any other video displayed via that tag?
2. YouTube has a level of security where a person can use "Google circles" to ensure that even if his YouTube URL gets leaked to the general public, still the only people who can view the video are people he deliberately selected to see it.
(they all need to have Google accounts). Does Azure have anything like this? It would provide me with an extra-layer of security - I could tell customers that even if my website is compromised, they are still protected.
3. if the answer to #1 is Yes, is the URL that I embed in the "video tag" just an ordinary URL such as myAzure.com/myvideo.mp4?
4. If I want to demonstrate to people how to upload the video and give it a URL that my website can use, is there an article on the web that you can recommend on this topic? One possibility would be for me to actually create a page for my own Azure account,
and then let others download it and replace my credentials by theirs.
5. From what I've read so far, I think you need credentials for every Azure Account. But a user might trust my website to have his credentials. So there are 2 cases. Suppose he trusts my website security, and wants his video to be
shown on my website. Does he need a form where he submits his Azure credentials, which I would then store in a database, and then use those credentials every time I display his video? And case #2, suppose he does not trust my website security.
Is there any way to display his video without his credentials?
6. Is encrypting videos a good idea? I know Azure has some feature of this nature, but I've also been told its very hard for hackers to intercept videos en-route between servers anyway. If I did use encryption, would it interfere with javascript
controlling the stream coming into the video tag (for instance, if I need to rewind to a certain point, or fast-forward to a certain point).
Thanks for any help, on any of these problems.
Gideon
