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After a few days of research, I am still not sure if I really understand Amazon CloudFront Signed URL's mechanism. Is that a fixed URL? Or it's different each time the page loads? To me, it only makes sense if that long, random looking part of the URL is different each time.

1) If it's changing, how do I generate it with Wordpress?

2) difficult situation: I am using a custom 360-degree video player and I need to provide the source videos as a list of URLs. How to add this list to this XML file if the signed URL keeps changing?

Sorry, but I don't seem to grasp the idea of signed URLs. Thanks!

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  • You may recall my recent answer, where I said "your web site needs to be running on a platform that can dynamically generate the HTML pages that link to the videos" (because they links are dynamic). If it's an XML file that actually links to the video, you'll need to be able to generate that XML "file" dynamically on each request... but then of course the question is, can someone hotlink to the XML file? You sort of need to approach this whole process holistically. Commented Aug 5, 2016 at 21:24

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S3 Pre-Signed URLs are different each time they are generated. Each pre-signed URL has an expiry date embedded inside it along with the credentials needed to access the object.

So each object's signature is different and the signature will be different each time the same object is pre-signed.

So you won't be able to pre-sign the URLs and save them for a long period of time.

Really, you should pre-sign them as the requests happen on the page and use as short an expiry time-period as possible that makes sense for your application.

If your video player is downloading the XML file of URLs from the web server, then you should generate a new XML file with new pre-signed URLs each time the file is requested from the client.

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Thanks Matt! Very helpful. But uhhh, I never thought that setting up a few videos on Amazon CloudFront with a bit of protection is THAT hard... ...It's almost close to be inaccessible for a video guy like myself (not programmer, only semi advanced in website dev.)

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