Hi everyone on the board this is my first post
Does anyone here know how to prevent the hotlinking of movies?? If you have a site with movies on it how do you prevent bandwidth theft?
I have a basic htaccess file which stops jpg and gif hotlinking but dont know how to protect my movies, any info or directions to info would be welcomed most heartily.
Thankyou

ShowPony

It will be the same as the image hotlink protection, except with different file extensions. Give the code you already have. Most hotlinking code usually has some sort ot (jpe?g|gif|png) regex in it, just separate each extension with a pipe: (jpe?g|gif|png|mpg|avi) etc.

I'm not really sure what you are asking.

What exactly is hotlinking?

I'm not the one asking webspace

Wikipedia
Bandwidth theft is the intentional usage of someone's bandwidth without that person's authorization. A number of types of bandwidth theft exist.

Basically, hotlinking is when you call things off another persons server to appear on your own page. For example, if you have a gallery on your site, someone might take the URL of one of your pictures and place it on their own page. Whenever someone views their page, they download the picture from your server.

Thankyou Chroder my penguinian friend
I think Ive solved the problem now though I searched and found some info on this topic I think Ive managed to modify it to my purposes. I will post it here anyway as it may be of use to somone else.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?whatevermysiteis.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|WMV|wav|mp3)$ http://www.whatevermysiteis.com/index.html [R,L]

My movie files are WMV files other people may have none capitalized wmv file names or whatever else like mpg mov etc. This stops someone from being able to put a link directly to my movie files on their sites effectively stealing them.
Thanks for the responses

Sorry Chroder,

I meant that question for ShowPony.

Thanks for the info.