How to know if PHDS is actually DRM'd and aes-128 encrypted, and what does it mean?

Question

hi
trying to figure out pRTMP which resulted in un-encrypted streams, an issue which has not been resolved yet:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4412068
we have tried using the PHDS protocol for serving VOD (video on demand) content to a flash player
using OSMF on a Flash 11 player like suggested.
everything seems to be ok, the stream is being published, and the .f4m meta file
seems to contain the DRM data.
What i do not understand is the lack of any
flash client interaction with this stream.
you simply need an OSMF player running on flash player 11 and you can play
the PHDS Stream, so where does the DRM come in?
is it only for protecting the stream from being listened to by a "man in the middle"?
or is it for protecting the stream from being served too many times?
is it to disable the ability to simply save the stream to a file?
is PHDS simply a one push button solution to create DRM'd streams
which don't require any special interaction with the app running on the flash player?
such as required when using the Flash Access server (which is a stand alone DRM server)
and last, the PHDS documentation describes a packager for video files,
but it is unclear when this tool has to be used to package streams, because it seems
that streams that have not been subjected to this tool still report valid DRM data inside
the f4m manifest, so when to use it, and can we trust the DRM metadata saying
that DRM is enabled and encrypted? (we have the same issue with the pRTMP which said stream is protected
but it was actually not so)
an f4m generated example:
<manifest xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/f4m/1.0">
<id>973266-40.mp4</id><streamType>recorded</streamType>
<duration>107.8</duration>
bootstrapInfo profile="named" id="bootstrap5925">
AABBAAAB0aFic3fAAAAAAAAAFgAAAAPoAAAAAAABpPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
</bootstrapInfo>
<drmAdditionalHeader drmContentId="973266-40.mp4" id="drmMetadata8114">AgARfASDFGAEFkZGSDFGHHl0aAW9u345YWxIZWFkZXIDAApFbmNyeXB0aW9uAwAHVmVyc2lvbgB
</drmAdditionalHeader>
<media streamId="973266-40.mp4" url="973266-40.mp4" bootstrapInfoId="bootstrap5925" drmAdditionalHeaderId="drmMetadata8114"> 
<metadata>AggAbgAKb23345NZXRhRGF0YQgAAAAAAAhkdXJhdGEasfvhflvbgBAWvMzMzMzMwAFd2lkdG
</metadata>
</media>
</manifest>

Answer 1

Hi,
I'll try to answer as many questions as best as I can
1. PHDS protects your content from being copied and stored by someone. An OSMF based player may be able to play your content but not steal it.
2. PHDS does not protect your content "from being served too many times". However, PHDS has a 24Hours policy which ensures that the client cant request new content after the expiration of 24Hours.
3. In PHDS the When Flash Media Server packages the content, it generates the license and embeds it into the DRM metadata of the content stream. The client parses this metadata and retrieves the license information from this DRM metadata. So there is no communication required between the client and a License server.
4. The f4f packaging process mentioned in the doc is to package on-demand content just-in-time when the client requests for it. There is not external tool. This is handled by the Apache module. So you see the drm meta information in your f4m file.
We also provide an offline tool that fragments and packages on-demand content. The output of the tool is protected content that you can store on your disk and stream over HTTP. For more information regarding this see : http://help.adobe.com/en_US/HTTPStreaming/1.0/Using/WS9463dbe8dbe45c4c-c126f3b1260533756d- 7ffc.html
PHDS supports SWF verification. SWF verification prevents unauthorized SWF files from accessing content. For more information regarding this see : http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flashmediaserver/devguide/WS47c0525fe440307e-685173b213221ed70 9a-8000.html#WSf46ce027e10bcc403985a9eb131ba034bd1-8000
Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Apurva