John Morris

You enter the URL that Amazon S3 gives… just the base unsigned URL. SmartS3 uses your Access Key and Secret Key (that you enter on the settings screen) to sign the URL for you.

To generate an instance of a player, you insert the shortcode and it handles everything for you. You can use the shortcode generator that appears in the post/page edit screen to have the shortcode generated for you.

If you want to just get a signed URL, you’ll want to use this function:

smarts3_get_url($url, $expiration = '10 minutes')

That will return just the URL already signed for Amazon S3. You can look in functions.php in the plugin to see all of the available template tags.

It can’t permanently expire the link. The “expiring URLs” part isn’t that. It’s in reference to Amazon S3 and the URL expiration system they use to prevent long-term hotlinking of your video URLs.

That said, it’d be pretty trivial for a developer to write up a small plugin to expire the page/post in the manner you described.

Hey Richard!

John from WishList Products. Just wanted to let you know I saw your ticket and I assigned to our best bug-zapper. I sent him a message and asked him to take a look as soon as he could. He should be replying to you shortly.

Thanks!

John

Hey gh0zt,

I’d be interested in how you suggest I encrypt those Amazon credentials… since once they’re hashed they can’t be unhashed (which is the point of hashing)… meaning, if they’re hashed, they can’t be used in the script to generate the secure Amazon URL.

My claims of secure are about the fact that the plugin allows you to create a secure, expiring URL… and, the plugin uses Amazon’s own PHP class for doing that… which requires your Amazon credentials in plain text.

So, again, not sure how you suggest I do that, but maybe you know something I don’t know!

John

Interesting. I just tested it with the latest version of WordPress in both Chrome and Firefox and it works just fine.

9 times out of 10 in this situation it’s a JavaScript conflict with another plugin… or your theme. Try it when running the default theme with all other plugins disabled and see if it works then.

Thanks! I’m glad you’re finding it useful. I hopefully can get some more updates posted in the coming weeks. Have some major upgrades I want to make.

Anyway, thanks again!

John

Hey James,

Ultimately, SmartS3 passes the URL you submit through an Amazon S3 PHP class to generate an authenticated URL. The class used is actually the one developed by Amazon and released on their developer’s site.

As an example, here’s one of my videos hosted on Amazon S3:

[video src="https://johnmorrisonline.com.s3.amazonaws.com/videos/how-the-internet-works.mp4" /]

It breaks down like this:

Bucket => johnmorrisonline.com
S3 URL => s3.amazonaws.com
Folder =>/videos
File => how-the-internet-works.mp4

The shortcode for SmartS3 is set up to form the URL this way. It shouldn’t affect whether your video plays or not. Amazon S3 understand the URL formatted both ways.

As for the HTTPS, I think I know what’s causing that. I’ll look into it and update it.

Are you having trouble with your videos playing? If so, can you send me an example page, so I can take a look.

Thanks!

John

FYI to anyone reading this. SmartS3 does now support LongTail AdSolution. Once you add the JW Player files to SmartS3 and select JW Player as your default player, you’ll see an option to add your LTAS Channel ID. Enter it and any videos embedded using the JW Player will server up your ads.

If you don’t want to server ads, but still use the JW Player, just leave the option blank.

At this time, it doesn’t work with the JW Player WordPress plugin. It DOES integrate with the JW Player, itself, though. All the necessary code is in place to use JW Player with SmartS3; however LongTailVideo’s licensing restrictions don’t allow me to bundle the two together in a release.

So, if you want to use the JW Player with SmartS3, you’ll have to download JW Player from their site (of course, abiding by their licensing guidelines)… then, copy its files into SmartS3.

It’s pretty straight-forward and you can find instructions here in the FAQs section:

https://johnmorrisonline.com/smarts3