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Amazon S3 Setup for ProgressAlly Media Player in AccessAlly

With AccessAlly Pro, you can easily configure Amazon S3 to work with ProgressAlly Media Player, then embed and track the progress of video and audio files hosted on your Amazon S3 account.

How Your Videos are Protected

Amazon S3 has several settings to protect your media, and if you follow the directions below then ProgressAlly will create a special “bucket” in your Amazon account that will protect your videos from being downloaded.

The bucket will contain the word “progressally” followed by unique randomized characters, like this:

Screenshot of Amazon S3 Bucket

If you only upload videos and content to your ProgressAlly created bucket, your videos:

  • Can only be watched on your AccessAlly site
  • Cannot be downloaded

Even though the bucket is set to “Public”, during the setup process below there is a script that prevents people from accessing the content outside of AccessAlly’s Media Player (other than you as the administrator).

What if you uploaded your content to another bucket?

If you have an existing bucket of content on Amazon S3, then you’ll want to set the videos to be “Read & Copy” for them to be available to the ProgressAlly Media Player.

However, people will be able to access these videos outside of your membership site if they get the link.

A better approach would be to move these files into your newly created ProgressAlly media bucket, which will protect your videos from being shared or downloaded.

Step 1: Enable Amazon S3 Integration

Inside your AccessAlly site, go to: ProgressAlly → Videos → Settings.

Then, check the box to enable Amazon S3 integration.

Amazon AWS Settings

Next, you’ll need to log into your Amazon S3 account to retrieve the API integration information:

Step 2: Integrate with Amazon S3

There are 2 options for setting AccessAlly Pro as a user:

  • (Simple) Use the root user: this involves the least amount of work, and it is the preferred method if security is not a big concern.
  • (Complex) Create a dedicated user: this is more secure, as the user will only have limited permission. It is also the ideal solution if both of the root user security keys are already in use. This is Amazon’s recommended flow!

Option 1: Root User Credentials

Here are the steps to get the root credential:

1. Login to AWS. Go to Account → My Security Credentials

AWS Step 1

2. Go to the Access Key section and click on Create New Access Key. You are limited to two of these for your account!

AWS Step 2

3. A box will appear noting this is not recommended. If you would like to proceed you can mark the box and continue, or stop and move to Step 2: Creating an IAM User which is Amazon’s preferred method.

AWS Step 3

4. Your access keys are created. Keep this window open so you can add them to ProgressAlly in the next step!

AWS Step 4

4. Enter the Access Key and Secret Access Key in ProgressAlly → Media → Settings.

IAM User Step 14

Option 2: Create IAM user

Alternatively, you can create a dedicated AWS user for ProgressAlly. Here are the steps:

1. Go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home#/users, log in, and create user.

IAM User Step 1

2. Add a User name, mark both items as shown in image below.

IAM user 2

3. Select “Attach policies directly” and then click “Create policy”

IAM User Step 3

4. Click JSON and copy the code below this image into the box.

IAM User Step 4
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"iam:GetRole",
"iam:CreateRole",
"iam:AttachRolePolicy"
],
"Resource": "*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "s3:*",
"Resource": "*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"mediaconvert:*"
],
"Resource": "*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"iam:PassRole"
],
"Resource": "*",
"Condition": {
"StringLike": {
"iam:PassedToService": [
"mediaconvert.amazonaws.com"
] }
}
},
{
"Action": [
"acm:ListCertificates",
"cloudfront:*",
"iam:ListServerCertificates",
"waf:ListWebACLs",
"waf:GetWebACL"
],
"Effect": "Allow",
"Resource": "*"
}
] }

5. Under Policy details enter ProgressAlly_video_permission

IAM User Step 5

6. Click Create User.

IAM User Step 6

7. Retrieve your password.

IAM User Step 7

8. In the Users tab click the link for your newly created user.

IAM User Step 8

9. Click “create access key”

IAM User Step 9

10. Select “Application running outside AWS”

IAM User Step 10

11. Set a description tag to make it easy to find this in the future! And… create access key.

IAM User 11

12. Click “Show” to reveal your Secret access key. Keep this tab open in your browser!

IAM User Step 12

13. Go to your AccessAlly site, click on ProgressAlly > Media > Settings once here select the box by “Enable Amazon AWS Video Hosting.”

IAM User Step 13

14. Add both your Access Key and Secret Access Key from Amazon S3. Review the additional recommendations (those are marked with a check below.)

IAM User Step 14

Step 3: Upload Your Videos

Once the integration information is entered and saved, you can upload videos directly to Amazon S3 by going to: ProgressAlly > Videos > Manage.

Manage Videos

When you upload your videos through this interface, your videos:

  • Can only be watched on your AccessAlly site
  • Cannot be downloaded
  • Are automatically converted into streaming videos

Currently, you can only upload MP4 videos for conversion to streaming through the Media Player.

NOTE: The default ProgressAlly bucket should NOT be used for direct file uploads. To do that, you should create a separate bucket in Amazon S3.

Step 4: Add Amazon AWS Videos To a Page

Finally, when you’re ready to add your Amazon AWS videos to a WordPress page, go to the Media tab in the page’s ProgressAlly settings.

Amazon AWS Video

Here, change the media source to Amazon AWS Video, and you can either select a video that’s already been uploaded from the dropdown, or click on the Upload Video button to upload a new video.

If you’d like, you can also upload a custom image for your video that incentivizes people to click in and watch.

Uploading Audio files for the Media Player

If you plan to use the ProgressAlly Media player to play MP3 audio files, then you might be wondering how to best upload and manage these files.

The AccessAlly Media uploader is specifically designed to convert MP4 video files into streaming video content, so it does not accept MP3 files.

However, you can upload MP3 files directly to the new Amazon S3 bucket that AccessAlly creates (by logging into your Amazon S3 account), and that will protect these files through your site.

Screenshot of Amazon S3 buckets

Upload the files you want to play through AccessAlly here.

Screenshot of uploading button for Amazon S3

Grab the URL of your Mp3 file:

Screenshot of URL to copy and paste

Then simply copy and paste the Amazon S3 URL into your Media player.

Screenshot of ProgressAlly Media Player Settings

Even though the folder in your Amazon S3 account says it is “public”, the only place that this MP3 will work is through your AccessAlly site – so even if someone grabs the URL it won’t be shareable.

Updated on November 16, 2023

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