making asp.net videos secure

Question

User-1112034352 posted

Suppose I have a video on the azure website.  I want to display it in a html5 video tag.  But I also want security. 

I could "encode" it, but I'm not sure what that accomplishes.  I think it prevents an eavesdropper from getting hold of the video.  On the other hand, if the wrong person gets hold of the URL of the video, I assume he can see it, encoding or not.  I assume that the html5 video tag decodes it, so he can create a web page to view it.

Is that true?

Answer 1

User1828997928 posted

If by secure you mean only allow authenticated users to view the video then follow these steps. First, you will want to store the video in Azure BLOB storage and turn off public access. Next you will have a web page that has some kind of user authentication in place. There are a number of different methods for authentication, but one simple option is to use the built-in ASP.NET SQL Membership Provider. You can even set this up to use Windows Azure SQL Database. If you do go down that route there are a few extra steps you need to take. See below link. In summary, you will make it so that only your website can access the videos in BLOB storage, and only authenticated users can view the content of your website. Also, decoding has nothing to do with security.

Set up ASP.NET SQL Membership Provider in SQL Azure