Peter and TDC123,
There was a product awhile back called Pixpo. It was a program that shared your files off your Harddrive out to other internet users, and it had a built in opion to disable download/view only. It also allowed you to manually set the expiration of the email link that you sent to share users. It was kinda neat, and was free for about 9-11 months and then I got an email saying the Pixpo server was being shut down and they were becoming a company called mixpo (www.mixpo.com is out there) with a more business oriented direction. Well Mixpo is there, but PIXPO is history. But used to be quite nice. I would set permissions to View Only, send a video link to a user through email. and when the user clicked on the icon for the link, it would open up a webbased viewer. I am thinking now that maybe they at the connecting server end, were converting it to a flash animation/movie on the fly so to speak and were streaming that to the user. The frame size was normally 320 x 240, the frame rate coming in (on another PC) was normally 12-15 Fps at 320/240. I also created some 640 x 480 movies and they came in at 8-11 Fps. A littel bit jerky but still very viewable.
And the nice thing was it was only viewable. You would click the link, a web based player would open up, and you could hit the play button on it to play and in a few seconds the movie would buffer up and you had a 320/240 movie playing in this web frame. Now I know that for a smart computer literate person capturing this video with a video capture utility, or poking around in the internet temp folder to locate the streamed download could be done, but for the average computer user it was just click and watch.. Very Nice. was good for content security. Pictures would also play in a slideshow manner, but you had to create it using the pixpo interface.
I am working on setting up a webserver, but have not decided on what software I
want to use yet. but once it is up I found a free program to convert AVI/WMV/MPEG's to flash movies and it creates the code to past into a website.
So that maybe the direction to go. I know you can currently select a movie and reencode it for streaming. What if an option existed to reencode as a flash
movie with an option in the end to generate a cut and paste code for a website,
or a link to it on the pogoplug device that would only allow viewing.
Something to think about. The sharing of photos, videos. and music is great, but for my home videos/ photo's I still want to retain the intellectual and
actual ownership rights to those files and not have them spread slowly over the
internet to YouTube, Facebook, etc.
John