[Plugin: Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator] Wont work on files stored behind password protection

Yes! Another user had this problem and I posted the solution in the comments on my website, but I’ll add it in to the instructions so people don’t have to scrounge for it. You can get around it by using the Embed from URL tab. Use the format https://username:[email protected]/uploads/2012/01/awesomevid.mp4 in the Video URL field. This is of course not super secure if you put it in the post, so I’d recommend using that format to generate thumbnails and then remove the username and password from the URL before you publish the post.

OMG THANK YOU! That is such as easy fix. I am super happy. Thank you Kyle! This is a game changer for me. Congrats on making the best video plugin WordPress has ever seen. ??

hey kyle,

so i’ve got thumbnails generating and videos embedding now behind members curtain by adding the login to the url like you said without fail.

i have an iPod Touch, and the videos are not playing. All I get is the poster image, nothing happens when I click on it.

On the smaller videos all over the site that aren’t in a member;s area, they work just fine on the iPod.

Any more advice??

Hmm. This is a slightly trickier issue. htaccess password protection doesn’t play nice with a lot of things, and apparently one of those is the <video> tag, which is what your iPod uses instead of Flash. The simplest option would be to add something like this to your .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch "\.(mp4|m4v|webm|ogv|ogg|flv)$">
Satisfy any
order allow,deny
allow from all
</FilesMatch>

That should make it work, but it would also allow any video files to be accessed if someone knew what the direct link to the file was.

I’ll look into adding some security options in the next version of the plugin, but right now there isn’t a simple way to hack it to add the username & password.

Hi Kyle, I added that exact coding to my .htaccess file in the root /members folder, and it didn’t change anything. On my iPod, all I see is the poster and it’s not clickable.

What I *might* do if we exhaust all efforts is to use your plugin to encode the files and use an HTML5 plugin to make them work. I don’t even know if that will work and it sounds like a LOT of work to get a few videos to play on an iPod. (dang technology)

So… do you have any other ideas? Thank you for being so accessible.

My plugin is creating HTML5 video elements, and those are the ones that aren’t working behind the .htaccess password protection. I’m not sure what other plugins do to deal with the problem. If you find one that does work, let me know which one it is.

It would be helpful for me to see what’s happening on your site. Can you email me a link to a video that’s not working? [email protected]