Hotlinking to movie files

February 28, 2005 9:21 PM

Hotlinking... In the Ryan thread, I listed the direct links to the movie files in response to a request. Afterwards, I wasn't sure if this was proper. I flagged my own post, and searched Metatalk, and didn't find anything for hotlinking.
posted by adzm to Etiquette/Policy at 9:21 PM (11 comments total)

Do you mean deep linking?
posted by drezdn at 9:55 PM on February 28, 2005

Sorry, i meant to link to my post, not my profile. This may be considered bandwidth theft, or something, since one could just download the movies without going through ads/etc. I'm not exactly sure what etiquette guidelines are on this issue.
posted by adzm at 10:00 PM on February 28, 2005

If the site allows it, I believe it's considered ok. Using off site images in IMG tags is not a good idea though.
posted by drezdn at 10:15 PM on February 28, 2005

It's impolite to hotlink images on a discussion board, generally. But directly linking to large multimedia files is an issue of bandwidth vs. one or both of a) context or b) site income from the surrounding ads. It's a judgement call.

Generally I think it's a good idea to directly link not to video files themselves, but to a Coral cache (up to 50Mb). Also, note that linking to a Coralized HTML page does not Coralize the embedded files. Not only does this save a site's bandwidth, downloads may be faster, and it can keep a server from going down.
posted by dhartung at 11:48 PM on February 28, 2005

Look what I made you do!
posted by squirrel at 12:35 AM on March 1, 2005

server settings? What server settings are you talking about odinsdream and drezdn? I'm curious, throw me a link or something.. Or a word I can google.. Please!
posted by dabitch at 1:12 AM on March 1, 2005

See also this thread: death to embedded video for more peoples opinions on the practice of deeplinking to video.
posted by dabitch at 1:15 AM on March 1, 2005

i'd call it direct linking. deep linking refers to the practice of linking to a page other than the top page on the domain and gets bitched about mostly by web-clueless commercial entities and hotlinking is IMO a meaningless term used by newly minted AOLers trying to sound http-hip.

dabitch, from my http.conf:

<Directory /my_image_dir>
Options None
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer my_domain\.com locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" locally_linked=1
<FilesMatch "\.(gif|png|jpe?g|mpe?ga?|swf|mov|avi|qt|mp3|wav)$">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=locally_linked
</FilesMatch>
</Directory>
posted by quonsar at 5:31 AM on March 1, 2005

I think that if you're thinking about direct linking to a large file like that, you should determine which people will lose out -- the people paying for the bandwidth and who would lose the ad revenue, or the people getting the file, who would lose the links to other great content available on the site. In those two cases, you should decide not to do it. In all others, go for it, but when in doubt, don't.
posted by crunchland at 5:36 AM on March 1, 2005

try "hotlinking" and "htaccess", dabitch. Those should make pretty good search terms (that's how I learned anyway). Also try "hotlinking" and "http.conf". And what q said.
posted by puke & cry at 6:59 AM on March 1, 2005

ta guys and quonsar. (usually "hotlinking" serves solutions that only apply to images and use the unreliable http_referer. I'm talking about video. Sounded like odinsdream knew a trick I didn't, s'all. )
posted by dabitch at 7:21 AM on March 1, 2005