Integrating WMSAuth to your website

Greetings!

Recently we've introduced WMSAuth, a link re-publishing protection feature for WMSPanel. We'd like to make a brief introduction to this solution from integration point of view. This feature is a bit more complicated than just statistics representation so it requires some extra actions to make.

Basically this protection solution requires changes for Wowza server and for customer's web site where all media content links are "signed" and provided to streaming clients. Those changes can be done by customer alone.

If you want to use WMSAuth link re-publishing protection, you must go through the following steps:

1. Sign up at WMSPanel and install an agent to your server to make it appear in the panel. This is the only action required for Wowza server side.
2. Create a Wowza test application for checking new protection scheme. You can use our Wowza server management for that.
3. At the web front end where you usually place links to your media content, you need to create a test script with a code snippet of signing your test application streams. The sample written in PHP, Java and C# may be taken from this github repo. PHP samples have flowplayer and JWPlayer. We can provide a sample source code in any programming language on demand.
4. At WMSPanel, go to WMSAuth top menu and create group to protect test application stream.
5. Check if protected links work well with the new signature and do not work without the same signature.
6. Once everything works fine in test mode, integrate the signature code based on a test sample into production environment, and test it.

After those steps your streams specified in WMSAuth rule will be protected against hot-linking.

Warnings
The following issues must be addressed while implementing this solution:

1. Time at all Wowza servers and Web servers, where links are signed, must be correct and in sync with each other.
2. Passwords on Web server part and Wowza server part must be equal.
3. Test this solution at testing Wowza applications and streams first. This is a complex feature and any changes or misunderstandings may cause your links to be inaccessible for your clients.

The same approach should be used for integration with Pay-per-view feature set because it's tightly coupled with WMSAuth.

Please also take a look at hot-linking protection for Nimble Streamer.

Hopefully this description will help defining resources and time required for applying WMSAuth to your media streaming solution. With help of our Wowza control and reporting panel you'll be able to handle statistics as well as protecting your media assets.


Please check FAQ and Troubleshooting section for any problems resolution or questions.

Related documentation

Paywall for Wowza, Geo and IP range restriction for Wowza, Wowza hotlinking re-publishing and re-streaming protection, Nimble Streamer HTTP hotlinking protection, Hotlinking protection with stream-based signature, Nimble Streamer geo-location restriction, Domain hotlinking protection, Pay-per-view for Wowza Media Server, github code samples