Table of Contents


Overview

Video Padlock is a great solution for keeping personal videos saved on your PC locked to others. Once a video is locked, it appears only inside Video Padlock, and can only be played from there. You can easily unlock and delete videos too. Video Padlock is designed to be convenient and fast, as well as secure.

Video Padlock interface

All locked Videos are accessed by a Master password. Once you enter the correct password, you'll see your videos. If you forget your password, you cannot access the video files. You need to enter your master password each time you use Video Padlock.

How to lock How to Lock a File

Locking files is easy. You can do it in two ways:

  • Drag and drop files into Video Padlock.

    or

  • Click the Lock button, and pick the files to encrypt.

Once a file is locked, the original file is removed, and the locked file appears in the list of files in Video Padlock.


Playing locked files How to Play Locked Files

To play a locked file, select it from the list, and click the Play button. When you're done playing the file, and you close Video Padlock, the file becomes locked again.


Unlock files How to Unlock a File

If you want to unlock a locked file, select it from the list and click the Unlock button. The file is restored to it's original location, with the same name it had before. The file is removed from the list of files.

Deleting locked files How to Delete a File

To delete a locked file, select the file and click the Delete button. The file is permanently removed from your PC. There is no way to recover the file once it is deleted.

Settings

Settings window

In the Video Padlock Settings dialog, you can do the following:

  • Set Encryption Method: (Fast Encryption or Full Encryption). Fast Encryption just encrypts the first 20 Kb of the file, which makes it unplayable, but does leave some of the media data intact. This is less secure, but offers very fast playback, even for super-large files. Full Encryption encrypts the entire contents of the file, which is fully secure, but may cause a delay when playing back a file. If you change the encryption method, existing files are still encrypted with the method in effect at the time they were encrypted.
  • Change Password: Re-encrypt your video files with a new password.
  • Open log file folder: For any support issues, you may be asked to attach the log file Video Padlock creates. This is an easy way to locate the file.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

I forgot my password. How can I recover my files?

Unfortunately, if you don't have your password, there is no way to recover your files. Any back-door to Video Padlock would compromise the security of the program.

How secure is the encryption?

Video Padlock uses 128 bit ARC4 encryption, which is a variant of RC4. If you use a sufficiently long password, even brute force methods would take several years to unlock your files using the fastest computer technology.

If my hard drive crashes and then I re-install Video Padlock or I use Video Padlock on a different computer how can I have Video Padlock list all my encrypted files so that I can decrypt them?

You can re-import all .lck files (Video Padlock encrypted files) into Video Padlock. Here's how:

  1. Run Video Padlock and click on the red "lock" button.
  2. In the "Select files to encrypt" dialog box, go to the folder where your encrypted files are and click on the "All Video files (*.avi; *.wmv; *.asf)" drop down list and select the "VPL encrypted files (*.lck) option.
  3. Select all the encrypted files and click on the "Open" button. All the encrypted files will then be imported into Video Padlock.