Bottom line.. DO NOT hotlink to my video files.

What is hotlinking (aka direct linking, leeching, bandwidth theft)?
Bandwidth theft or "hotlinking" is direct linking to a website's files (images, video, etc.).
A simple analogy for bandwidth theft: Imagine a random stranger plugging into your electrical outlets, using your electricity without your consent, and you paying for it.

So, hotlinking/direct linking is basically linking directly to a video file on my server and it playing thru a page you have created... that uses my bandwidth to play the video and its stealing!

I caught a guy doing this all over myspace.com and couldn't help but do everything I could to punk him.
The first thing I did was change a couple of small gif files that he posted on his myspace profile into some LARGE gif files informing him that he was busted.
So, a small gif of a football play that was originally 200x130 pixels in size just turned into a 1000x1000 pixel gif that basically says "BUSTED!!" (and quite a few other choice words).

This same guy also posted links to my videos in other people's profiles. With this link, it would play the video directly in the profile... which would eat up A LOT of my bandwidth. Well, what I did in this case is make a brief video saying "BUSTED". I place my "busted" video on my server as the same file name as he used in his hotlink, and, instead of showing up as a Cowboys video it winds up showing up like this:

BUSTED ON MYSPACE.COM BANDWIDTH LEECHING

Basically, do me a favor and simply link people to the video page (www.cowboysvids.com) rather than linking directly to files on my server. Its OK if you simply post a download link on a forum for a small size clip, but please post links to the main page for the larger files. And definitely don't post links like Edward did that play automatically in a webpage.

I really appreciate your cooperation with this. It will prevent me from having to add a bunch of scripting to block direct linking to files.

Enjoy the videos on my site and feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.

TEK2000