I was just playing some Bowie off google play music on my PC and became curious as to how they have stopped illegal downloading. The All Access feature of google play means you can listen to any music on their servers for a fixed fee a month so I figured they must have a mechanism to stop users downloading anything they're streaming.
I opened up the network log and opened the URL of the audio stream in another tab. It opened fine and showed the MP3 play buttons as expected but the play button does nothing. I understand they will probably be using some kind of cookie method to stop hotlinking but that doesn't mean you can't download it shortly after you've clicked play in the play music client. Its been racking my mind for a while now and I can't think how they might have done it. They seemingly just use the new HTML5 features to play all audio.
Does anyone have any insight into how the genius' at google have done this?
As long as your computer can play the song, it can be recorded (e.g. Freecorder). This is similar to recording songs off the radio onto cassette tape.
It's possible to pirate the songs, but if they make it easy and cheap enough for you to buy the music, they hope you'll just buy it.
Besides, there are PSAs that tell you how illegal and wrong it is to pirate music.
Related
A friend of mine has a website and you can watch videos on it but if you have IDM you can download the video. Is it possible to play the videos and not let IDM download them from there? Any answer that even slightly helps is appreciated.
I think the best way is: STREAM THE VIDEO IN SEPARATED ENCRYPTED PARTS.
There are video hosting services such as vzaar that have this functionality. As far as I know, that will make it really hard to download directly. At least for 95% of the people.
But of course, if the video plays on the screen people can just use a screen recorder and some simple software to record sound from the audio output (but he/she will have to play the ENTIRE thing to save it, totally inconvenient).
I have web application(similar to Karaoke) where user can record his voice over instrumental.
After recording user plays back recording. Here I play instrumental in <audio> tag and voice using web audio api. To sync both audios on play/pause I calculate time like this
pausedAt = Date.now() - startedAt;
startedAt = Date.now() - pausedAt;
This works fine. Issue is when user uses slider on audio tag to move forward/backward. I am thinking of solution like this
Use ontimeupdate event, stop the voice and then use startAt(currentTime) where currentTime is of instrumental playing in audio tag.
Since there is no seekTo function in api, I have to stop and then start audio. Is there any better solution for this?
Second issue I face is seeking on audio tag is not smooth. If I arbitrarily clicks on progress bar sometimes it doesn't work. When I saw network tab in developer tool window I saw something like shown in image. It sends out some 600 requests and some 86 MB data downloaded whereas file size is less than 10 MB.
You really should use the Web Audio API to do this. will never give you precise synchronization, and it will rely on streaming to seek - which is going to result in extra downloading, as you saw. Just load the song via XHR and decodeAudioData, and provide your own playback controls.
Check out this space shooter demo.
The HTML5 audio is perfect on Chrome 18 and Firefox 10. There is no lag in playing sounds and each sample plays perfectly. The last time I tried to play sounds using HTML5 audio and JavaScript I couldn't get a sound to play more than once.
What sorcery is Scirra doing to make this so perfect?
I'm the developer of Construct 2, so I hope I'm sufficiently qualified to answer your question :)
HTML5 audio is indeed a mess, so I've gone to considerable lengths to try and make it bulletproof in Construct 2. Here's an outline of what I've done:
Use the Web Audio API
HTML5 audio appears designed for streaming music, so a HTML5 Audio object is kind of a heavyweight object. Playing 10 sounds a second with it like Space Blaster does can easily seize up the browser. On the other hand, the Web Audio API is a high-performance audio engine with routing, effects, and lightweight sound playback. It's perfect for games. Audio buffers and audio playback are separated, so you can have one data buffer and efficiently play it many times simultaneously, whereas some browsers are so buggy if you play a HTML5 sound a few times it re-downloads it each time! Since it was actually designed for games and such, you can happily play back tonnes of sound for ages and it will still hum along nicely. It can also use HTML5 audio as a sound source, although I only use HTML5 audio for things the user has designated as music tracks (since that's where you'd prefer to have streaming - typically everything else in the Web Audio API is fully downloaded before playing).
The Web Audio API is supported in Chrome, has also made it in to iOS 6+ (although it's muted until you try to play some audio in a touch event), Firefox are working on support, and it should be coming soon to Chrome for Android. So on these platforms audio will be significantly more reliable.
More info on HTML5Rocks and the proposed spec - you'll have to use the spec as the documentation for now, there's not much else out there.
Other browsers: implement an audio recycling system
The Web Audio API isn't yet supported everywhere, notably IE, which means you still need to crowbar HTML5 audio in to something that might work for games for backwards compatibility. The way to do this is to recycle audio objects.
The player's laser in Space Blaster fires 10 times a second - and that's not including any other sound effects! As I mentioned earlier, Audio is kind of a heavyweight object, so if you're doing new Audio() 10+ times a second, lo and behold, the browser eventually dies and audio starts glitching up. However, you can drastically reduce the number of Audio objects created by recycling them.
Basically, for each sound effect, keep a cache of every Audio object you've created with that sound as a source. Then, when playing a new sound, search the cache for any sound effects which have finished playing (the ended property will be true). If you find one, rewind it back to the beginning (currentTime = 0) and play() again. Otherwise, create a new Audio() object in the cache.
Since the player's laser sound effect is short, instead of creating 600 Audio objects a minute, there will just be 3 or 4 that it keeps cycling round. Some browsers unfortunately will still download it 4 times (Safari did this last I checked!) or have high latency the first time each sound buffer is played, but eventually the browser catches up since the same buffers are always being reused. So basically sound might be a bit weird for a few moments, then it clears up. We also use the HTML5 app cache so next time you play everything loads from disk, so subsequent plays should perform well immediately.
That's basically it. It's still a little dodgy on the first play with HTML5 audio, but every time after that should be fairly solid providing the browser has a sane audio implementation. There are a number of ways to try to clone Audio objects, but I've found that rewinding existing Audios works best.
There's no SoundManager or any Flash/plugin-based fallbacks at all since we make a point of being pure HTML5.
We also support audio APIs provided by PhoneGap and appMobi for mobile, since HTML5 audio on mobile isn't even worth trying. That makes a total of four audio APIs our audio engine wraps, and yes, it does look like a frankenstein mess, but it works.
That's it. I suppose our competitors will read this, but who cares when there's SO rep to be had???!!!1111
working on a project with a custom flv player.
Everything works as it should
However, the flv's don't seem to be caching, if I play the video once, close the player, and replay again, the video has to cache -load entirely again before the video starts playing.
Can anyone suggest troubleshooting steps since, as far as i know, this should not be the way it works...
As spender mentioned, if you are not loading the flv via http, then caching does not apply.
You might want to check out Greensock's LoaderMax, as it provides highly configurable and easy-to-use video playback functionality which has ironed out many of the kinks in Adobe's own video player classes:
http://www.greensock.com/loadermax
So I'm trying to play music on a webpage, but whenever it plays for the first time, you have to go through a short but annoying process of enabling quicktime for the website.
Is there either:
Another way to play music (a different music player) that can still be invisible and plays immediately?
A way to force enable quicktime when they get to the site?
So yeah, please help me out!
What I did was I just embedded an invisible youtube player. Works decently.