Does hotlinking protection apply to generated thumbnails as well?

If you enable paywall and hotlink protection with a hash for a particular stream, does that also enable paywall protection for the generated thumbnails? For example:

http://<server>/<app>/<stream>/dvr_thumbnail_<epoch_time>.jpg?wmsAuthSign=c2VydmVyX3RpbWU9NS80LzIwMTIgODozMzowNSBBTSZoYXNoX3ZhbHVlPXE3MjN6aEVmdGFUOUJoWjBQTmw1TVE9PSZ2YWxpZG1pbnV0ZXM9MjA2

Otherwise this would be a way for someone to partially view the stream content if you are trying to keep that private.

Hi,
good question. Thumbnails were primarily intended for cases there people want to show current/past state of archive. With wmsauth you need to specify what protocol to protect explicitly. thumbnails are not belong to any protocols like hls,dash, pd. We probably need to add thumbnails as separate item in wmsauth rules. And if user enabled thumbnail in wmsauth rules, server should reject requests without signature.
What do you think of that ?

Hello.

This is expected default behaviour.

It is actually works for mp4 thumbs which is considered as PD (progressive download), but not for jpg thumbs which are not marked as PD.

As a workaround, to make jpg protected, you can mark jpg as PD via the following option in /etc/nimble/nimble.conf:
custom_pd_exts=jpg

Do not forget to restart Nimble after editing nimble.conf (e.g. sudo systemctl restart nimble)

Please find details on the next page:
https://wmspanel.com/nimble/param#custom_pd_exts

Thank you.

Yes, that sounds like it makes sense and would be a very good implementation. Another use for thumbnails that has become common is using them to provide a quick preview as you mouse over the timeline of a long running stream, for example, to help you figure out where you want to navigate. I think this sounds perfect for that use case when that stream is protected by wmsauth and encryption.

Hi,
Sergey is right. if you check "Progressive Download" checkbox in wmsauth rules all your ".mp4" thumbnails will be protected. To protect ".jpg" thumbnails please add following parameter into nimble.conf
custom_pd_exts=jpg
after restart "Progressive Download" checkbox in wmsauth will for for ".jpg" thumbnails as well.
It looks like you can archive what you want even now !

Just tried this out it works perfectly. Thanks guys! This is a nice little hidden feature.