Does Media Player cache http streams locally?

Question

Hi,
I am developing a secure video playback system. I am planning to load encrypted data, decrypt it and present it from a http server. This would be read by the media player using http progressive download. The security is lost if the media player stores the stream locally. Any help on finding out where the media player might store data if it does? If I use rtsp, will it solve the problem?
Regards,
Arun

Answer 1

On my Linux system, I played a JavaFX program designed to read media from http. Then I used the command line to print a list of all file descriptors in use. None of the file descriptors being used by the JavaFX program looked caching related, but I am honestly not sure whether or not it does in fact cache.
Since the documentation doesn't say anything, whether or not it caches and how it does so may very well be OS specific. As such, figuring out whether there even IS a problem, let alone how to solve it would be very tricky.
Even if it does cache, you'll still be about as safe as it gets. The vast majority of the population won't have a clue how to steal your video.
As for hackers, they probably have better things to do with their time and there isn't much you can do to stop them (short of not placing the film online in the first place of course!). Even if a hacker can't find a video cache, they could still decompile your program to figure out where the media is being downloaded, which would make the caching issue irrelevant. And even if you made it difficult to read the URL from a decompiler, there is nothing you can do to prevent them from just filming the screen.