S3MediaVault is a WordPress plugin.

You install it just like you would install any WP plugin.

1) Download the plugin zip file S3MediaVault_vXX.zip to your desktop.

2) Log in to your WP admin panel, go to the Plugins section, add and upload the plugin file as usual, and activate it.

3) Now Under the “Settings” tab on your dashboard, you should see a new link called “S3MediaVault”.

Click on it. You are now on the S3MediaVault Plugin Configuration screen.

4) In a new browser window, log in to your Amazon S3 account. Once you login, on the menu at the top, click on the “Your Account” tab, and then on “Security Credentials”

5) You will now see your Access Key and Secret Key (click on “Show” to show your secret key).

6) Come back to the Config Screen for S3MediaVault.

Enter these Access Key, Security Key and your Bucket Name (folder where your files are stored in your S3 account).

Click on “Save Changes”.

Security Setting For Files

For each file that you use the S3MediaVault plugin with, please be sure to set the permissions of your file on Amazon S3 such that it won’t be open to the general public, but only you and the S3MediaVault script can access the files.

WARNING: Bucket name has to be in all lower case

1. Log in to Amazon S3 Control Panel at https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home
2. Once you log in, you will see all of your buckets on the left. Click on the bucket where your media is stored that you wish to use with the S3MediaVault plugin.
3. On the right, you will see all files within that bucket.
   
4. Right-click on the file name which you wish to protect, and you’ll see a popup appear. In that popup, click on “Properties”
   
5. You will now see a new, large “Properties” panel towards the bottom of the screen.
6. In this panel, on the “Permissions” tab, you should add only one row: Which should have your name, and all checkboxes checked, as shown below (click to enlarge).
   
   Please note that the screen-shot above shows the name “ravijayagopal”, but when you view this screen, in place of “ravijayagopal”, you will actually see your own username (whoever you’re logged in to Amazon as).
7. You should do this not just for all the files that you wish to use with S3MediaVault, and you should also do it for your bucket (folder) too, by right-clicking on the bucket name and setting similar permissions for the bucket contents as well.

That’s it for the setup.

You are now ready to start using the S3MediaVault plugin, simply by inserting any of the following tags into your blog posts:

1) Video-Tags,

2) Link-Tags or

3) URL-Tags

Below is a video being played using the JW FLV player, and S3MediaVault supports it right out of the box.

Usage 1

Here’s the simplest JW Plugin with s3mv:

Note: Uses default JW settings for my site (set elsewhere)

[jwplayer file=[s3mv]YOURVIDEO.mp4,url[/s3mv]]

Usage 2

<script type='text/javascript' src='/jw/swfobject.js'></script>
<div id='mediaspace'>Check Out My Cool New Video</div>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var so = new SWFObject('/jw/player.swf','mpl','480','360','9');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');
so.addParam('wmode','opaque');
so.addVariable('author','Ravi Jayagopal');
so.addVariable('description','Amazon S3 Plugin for JW Video Players');
so.addVariable('type','video'); so.addVariable('file',escape('[s3mv]YOURVIDEO.flv,url[/s3mv]'));
so.write('mediaspace');
</script>

This usage is what you’re seeing in the demo above.

S3MediaVault.com has a “autobuffer” setting, which you can use to make sure that videos DO NOT automatically load as soon as the visitor arrives at your page.

This is especially useful when you have multiple videos within a blog post, and you don’t want your Amazon S3 Bandwidth meter to start running unless a user actually tries to play a video (by clicking on the “Play” button).

See examples of both “Multiple-Videos In A Post” as well as the “No Autoplay, No Autobuffering” below…

Video 1:

Video 2:

URL-Tags For Getting A “Secure, Expiring URL”

Use this tag to get back a secure, expiring and raw URL for your media file on S3, which you can then use to create your own HTML within your blog post – say to create your own image that says “Click here to download” that points to this expiring URL.

Basically, wherever you insert the following URL tag, the tag will be replaced by the secure expiring URL a link to your file.
So this…

[s3mv]businesscard-proof.pdf,url[/s3mv]

becomes this…

http://s3mediavault.com.s3.amazonaws.com/businesscard-proof.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=1HPS101KFMM8SKNK9BG2&Expires=1371717693&Signature=%2BcF9%2FPjmRsVuU7s54a7ILCBijG4%3D

 

And if you wish to display a full-fledged downloadable link that points to a file on Amazon S3, with some link text that says “Click here to download…”, then you could do something like this…

<a href="[s3mv]businesscard-proof.pdf,url[/s3mv]"> Click here to download my super-duper-freakin-awesome report </a>

WARNING 1: DO NOT REPLACE THE TEXT “url” in the shortcode above. It must remain as “url”.

WARNING 2: YOUR FILE NAME SHOULD NOT START WITH http://….

Example A: Using this “Expiring URL” to create your own HTML link

Click here to download my super-duper-freakin-awesome report

Example B: Creating an Image-based download link:

Click here to download

Users can then just click on the link, or do a “Right-Click, Save-As” and save the file to their computer.

- Ravi Jayagopal

Next: Protect Videos Using “Video-Tags”

=> Click here for a Video-Tags Demo

S3MediaVault can protect not just Video or Audio files, but can also protect regular files of any kind…

PDF, MS Word docs, .zip, images, even Javascript files.

You can basically protect any file with any extension!

Entering this in your post:

Download the file here: [s3mv]businesscard-proof.pdf,link[/s3mv]

(Order: filename,link)

WARNING

DO NOT REPLACE THE TEXT “link” in the shortcode above. It must remain as “link”. Modify only the file name

YOUR FILE NAME SHOULD NOT START WITH http://….

Results in this….

Download the file here: businesscard-proof.pdf

Here is an example.

Try the link below. It links to a PDF file stored on Amazon S3. When you click on the link, you will see that you cannot access the file.

http://s3mediavault.com.s3.amazonaws.com/businesscard-proof.pdf (opens in new window).

Then come back to this page.

Now see how S3MediaVault allows you to download the very same file, via the link below:

businesscard-proof.pdf

- Ravi Jayagopal

Next: Protect Videos Using “Video-Tags”

=> Click here for a Video-Tags Demo

Welcome to S3MediaVault.com.

Below you will find demos that show how the S3MediaVault plugin works.

Video-Tags Demo

The URL of the video being played is:

http://s3mediavault.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wcpsales.mp4

Go ahead and try clicking on the above link (opens in a new window). You will get an “Access Denied” error.

But see how the exact same video is being played below.

That’s because the S3MediaVault Plugin has enabled Secure Access to the video file stored on Amazon S3.

And the plugin makes sure that the video file can be played only from this web site (and wherever else the plugin is installed, of course).

All you need to do is to insert a simple Video-Tag (like the one below) into any WordPress post.

[s3mv]wcpsales.mp4,480,360,false,false[/s3mv]

(Order: filename,width,height,autoplay,autobuffer)

Now on top of this security, if you wanted to add another layer of security to make this blog post available only to paying members, then check out DigitalAccessPass.com, a WordPress Membership Plugin which lets you do exactly that.

Feel free to add your comments below.

- Ravi Jayagopal

Next: Protect “Regular Files” Using “Link-Tags”:

=> Click here for a Link-Tags Demo

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