I'm using a popular php video-sharing script for my web site.
I've modded it so vistors must pay to view a video, however the path to the thumbnail appears on the html page in the View Source code, which is very similar to the path to the actual video. Is there any way to hide the path code?

Probably not without rewriting several parts of the script, no...

Since the browser has to load the video, the only way to hide it is to hide it from the browser. You can base the display of the video off of session variables (or whatever else you choose) to make it harder for people to share the URL, however.

There are ways to hide the video url from appearing but smart people who understand html can still get it.

If you really want to hide it then best is to password protect it. I have seen some sites do this. May be you can search google how to do this.

If you dont care about select few who are good at html then you can try to play video through javascript file. That will make it difficult for average user to get the url. You can google this and see how to do it.

I dont know how it is with video files. But with image files at least, you can have php serve the contents of an image file to the page with the correct mime type (basically printing out the mime header and then the file contents). That means when you view the php file you'll actually see an image. That means you can have all your image paths in a database and instead of using the real path to the actual image in the <img> tag, you'd do something like this

PHP Code:

<img src="show_image.php?image_id=12345"> 


Then nobody will be able to see the actual paths unless they manage to get into your database. Using a mime type for video files instead, I'm guessing you could do the same thing for video files.