FV Player Pro can protect your videos from downloading. It works if your video is a HLS stream with encryption (AES-128). FV Player Pro will only give the user the decryption key if it finds the user initiated the playback on your website. So it’s better than just a standard HLS stream with encryption where the decryption key is sent to anybody.
Encrypted HLS streams might sound difficult, but FV Player Coconut makes them easy to create right in your WordPress admin dashboard.
However this has recently become slightly unreliable as more and more mobile users with iPhones are using the iCloud Private Relay. It works as a VPN, except sometimes the IP address of the user changes even for a single website pageload. It can stay the same on one page load and then on another it might change.
This VPN currently only works for the Safari web browser. So you can use another browser on your iPhone and you will not be affected. If we detect iCloud Private Relay with Safari browser and the encrypted HLS playback fails, we do hint the user to use another browser already:
iCloud Private Internet Relay blocks HLS playback. Please use another browser.
That’s why FV Player Pro can be set to use a cookie instead of IP address using the new “Cookie Protected Encrypted HLS” setting in wp-admin -> FV Player -> Settings -> Pro Features.
The cookies are very easy to spoof, unlike the IP address. So it might be easier to decrypt the video as two people of different networks can cooperate on the the video encryption cracking.
Overall we do not like the new iCloud Private Relay feature as it cannot retain a single IP address even on a single website session. Seems like once again we have to adjust our product only to avoid bugs caused by a big tech company.
Apple gives us a list of their iCloud Private Relay IP addresses for which we should apply different rules: Prepare your network or web server for iCloud Private Relay However the IP gelocation feeds which is recommends is 11.9 MB. There’s no way we are making that part of FV Player! (Note: we created a much smaller 389 kB version of it, so our detection might be a bit unreliable)
That’s why we are not enabling the “Cookie Protected Encrypted HLS” setting by default.
Martin Viceník
Martin graduated as an engineer in Computer Science from Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. He grew up in Liptovský Mikuláš in northern Slovakia next to the beautiful Tatra mountains. He is the developer behind our FV Player.
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