Is there anyway to bypass the blocked videos on mobile? First I tried to fire up normal youtube intent, then I used WebView (using both video and iframe tags), and lastly I changed the user agent of WebView to a desktop client but none of the above mentioned way worked. I tried rtsp to stream the video using VideoView but it would only give me a low quality 3gp video, which is what Youtube API gives.
I am running out of options. Any help would be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
I ran into the same thing with some of our videos on YouTube and found out that only YouTube controls if it will be allowed to show on a mobile. We never found a work-around for it other than hosting the video on our server or using Vimeo. But as it stands,YouTube has control over mobile viewing. Also do you have that video monetized? Monetizing a video on YouTube can also cause them to not allow it on mobile especially if it has any content that YouTube is saying is a Third Party or Copyright infringement. They told us we had third party content when it was all shot by us. Further reading in that problem showed that YouTube's new digital fingerprint is the main culprit for creating a new wave of problems for users trying to upload their own videos they made and own. i.e., a user tried to upload a video of his backyard with birds in it and the birds were singing. When he tried to upload it, YouTube said it was Copyrighted! How do you Copyright bird chirps everyone is now asking!
So try Vimeo or use your own server to deliver the content. Sorry I can't offer more help.
I remember being able to bypass the block as a user by asking the desktop version of the YouTube site and then watching the video with the (not updated anymore) Flash Player for Android. So maybe you could try pretending to be the Flash Player when asking for the video from your app. Maybe use a network sniffer to see what it's doing.
User "OMA" gave an answer (use 'Desktop Mode'), that sometimes works and is easy to try.
Next up is this Site (or a similar one): http://www.mobileyt.com/ which accepts an URL, then shows your Video.
A Proxy Server might assist you with access, particularly if it is a 'Country Restriction' (for Mobile, but does not mention the Country Restriction only the Mobile one). Any ADs served to that Country may be poorly received (Language / Customs); so it is blocked.
You can try a Spoofing Application for your Mobile Browser (Hint: Spoof you Browse with the Opera Browser OR use Explorer 10 on WinXP they won't be ready for that).
Combining those techniques can assist in difficult cases. You can also resort to downloading the Video and playing it with MX Player or VLC (for Mobile).
Good luck, and if at first you don't succeed ...
Related
There is a website pdisk.net and whatever the video we upload from our computer to the site and share the link to view it, the videos open only in Playit android app. Only first 15 seconds can be viewed after that a screen appears showing "to play the video, install Playit app from playstore". What is happening to the videos in the backend when we upload on pdisk.net website? I think the site is owned by Playit app only. I noticed that the uploaded videos use final url a6.hentai.com...etc to stream the videos which can be streamed fully using the app only.
Can someone tell if the videos are encoded or encrypted backend and the app is made to decrypt the videos? Is such thing possible?
'''no code req.'''
In their FAQ page, they have mentioned that:
Video downloaded by Apps uses Smart Muxer technology.Smart Muxer is a
unique technology developed by PLAYit, can merge the video and audio
within seconds without any extra recoding and storage. It’s really
workable when there are some videos have no build-in audio and need to
be merged in the devices with low configurations. Due to the unique
technology, the video can be only played by PLAYit and the other
main-stream players can’t support. And videos shared to social apps
can also be opened in PLAYit.
I found one of the discussion in reddit, as mentioned by one of the users:
They encrypt the normal mp4 video in some kind of way which enables
them to limit the playback to their app.
As for documentation, there is not much available online. But found this feature request in VLC forum.
I want to embed video's on our website that should work with these restrictions:
The video needs to start as soon as the user clicks on play. As far as I can tell this means that the video must be either streamed or it must use progressive downloads.
The video must not be downloadable by sending the link to other people.
The video must be protected against being viewed without being allowed to do so.
The video must work on all devices, also the ones that do not support flash such
as iOS and android
As a backend I use amazon cloudfront. So far we have used RTMP, but that obviously does not work for iOS or android devices.
What we’re planning to do is this:
For flash platforms we use RTMP with the amazon signed URL’s to prevent anyone to view the content.
For iOS we want to use HLS with a generated m3u8 file that contains signed URL’s to the TS files
For Andoid devices I'm not yet sure what to use.
My questions are these:
Is this a viable setup, or are is there a superior setup that ticks all the boxes?
What should we use for the android case?
I would suggest, use pre-signed hls/m3u8 for both ios and flash.(https://github.com/mangui/HLSprovider). For Android you can use normale html5 video streams with quality selection (signed URLs of course).
For Android you have to use RTSP protocol.
Wowza media server is the perfect solution for you.
In my Android app I'd like the user to tap an image once, have a youtube video play automatically and when the video is done the user is immediately returned to the app. What's the best way to do this in Android?
I tried using intents. This works in that the video comes up on what I think is a youtube web page. However playing the video requires another tap. I'd like to avoid this if possible.
I tried the whole MediaPlayer, prepareAsync, setOnPreparedListener and never got it to work. For some reason onPrepared was never called. No exceptions were thrown. I'm using the emulator to test and I'm new to Android so I'm not sure if the behavior will be different on physical devices.
I got this working well on iOS by getting creative with webviews. I'm hoping it's more straightforward on Android. The docs sure make it sound straight forward.
Cheers!
Update: Everything below is still correct, but the official YouTube API for Android is now available.
By far, the easiest way to play a YouTube video on Android is to simply fire an Intent to launch the native Android YouTube app. Of course, this will fail if you are not on a certified Google device, that doesn't have the complement of Google apps. (The Kindle Fire is probably the biggest example of such a device). The problem with this approach is that the user will not automatically wind up back at your app when the video finishes; they have to press the Back button, and at this point you've probably lost them.
As a second option, you can use the MediaPlayer API to play YouTube videos. But there are three caveats with this approach:
1) You need to make a call to YouTube's GData webservice API, passing it the ID of the video. You'll get back a ton of metadata, along with it the RTSP URL that you should pass to MediaPlayer to play back an H.264-encoded stream. This is probably the reason why your attempt to use MediaPlayer failed; you probably weren't using the correct URL to stream.
2) The GData/MediaPlayer approach will only play back low-resolution content (176x144 or similar). This is a deliberate decision on the part of YouTube, to prevent theft of content. Of course, this doesn't provide a very satisfactory experience. There are back-door hacks to get higher resolution streams, but they aren't supported on all releases of Android and using them is a violation of YouTube's terms of service.
3) The RTSP streams can be blocked by some internal networks/firewalls, so this approach may not work for all users.
The third option is to embed a WebView in your application. There two approaches you can take here:
1) You can embed a Flash object and run the standard desktop Flash player for YouTube. You can even use the Javascript API to control the player, and relay events back to the native Android app. This approach works well, but unfortunately Flash is being deprecated on the Android platform, and will not work for Android 4.1 and later.
2) You can embed a <video> tag to play YouTube via HTML5. Support for this varies between various releases of Android. It works well on Android 4.0 and later; earlier releases have somewhat spotty HTML5 <video> support. So, depending upon what releases of Android your application must support, you can take a hybrid approach of embedding HTML5 on Android 4.x or later, and Flash for all earlier versions of Android.
There are several threads here on StackOverflow about using HTML5 to play YouTube video; none of them really describe the entire process you must follow in one place. Here's links to a few of them:
Android - How to play Youtube video in WebView?
How to embed a YouTube clip in a WebView on Android
Play Youtube HTML5 embedded Video in Android WebView
All of this will get dramatically easier in the weeks/months to come; at Google I/O 2012, they presented/demoed a new YouTube API for Android that will support direct embedding of YouTube content in your application, with full support back to Android 2.2 (about 95% of the Android userbase as of this writing). It can't arrive fast enough.
This question already has an answer here:
I need to Play .M4V foramt audio from url, Problem with playing .M4V format
(1 answer)
Closed 2 years ago.
I am a web developer delivering video on a webpage. When I link to a video file (.m4v), Android wants to download the video to the phone, and then you can play the video from your phone.
On an iPhone (and Palm Pre), however, the same link just opens up the video in the media player, and returns to the web page upon completion.
My website is for members only, and I would prefer them not to be able to download the videos. Obviously I know there is no way to completely protect the videos, but I would like to at least make it appear like you can't download the video for a casual user. Streaming is not really an option.
So my question is how do I deliver the iPhone experience (opening in a media player) on an Android phone?
FYI, I've been testing this out with my Evo.
If Youtube is an option for you, the default Youtube app will do what you want (open the video on its own Activity, then returning back to the browser). Obviously, you might know that there are thousands of Youtube downloader, so it's not a really secure way to prevent downloads.
Hint: Youtube has "private sharing"
Another alternative, if your users uses Android 2.2 (Froyo) or the SkyFire browser is Flash. Froyo and SkyFire allows running Flash in the browser.
I'm researching the development of an Android (2.2) app/service that will enable users to record short (I do emphasize short, < 30seconds) video on their phones and then upload that video (HTTP) to a server that will then transcode the video to other formats. That same user can download videos from other Android users and play them.
Now, I get a bit lost with everyones recommended approaches to all the issues in doing something like this because I haven't seen any ask this in a cohesive context. Ideally I would like a non commercial solution to this (as in no vendor/service being needed for the the video hosting/transcoding), but, feel free to include those as a recommendation (I've marked this as a wiki) as I know many like to use youtube and vimeo for the middle layer in all this.
The questions are
What server technologies do you
recommend for hosting and
transcoding?
What technology do you
recommend for streaming the video (it
would be nice to offer a high and
low quality encoding depending on
the users network connection)
What video format and software do you recommend for converting the uploaded video on the server to be viewable later by other Android owners.
Im assuming it's bad to do any transcoding on the phone prior to upload (battery/proc issues), but, if I'm wrong with that assumption what do you recommend?
Some things that may help you...
The video will only need to render on an Android device, and in the future in a webkit html5 browser.
Bandwidth isnt cheap (even with numerous 30 second videos), so a good mix of video quality and video file size is important (streaming if needed to ensure quality vs. download).
This is for android 2.2 devices with a video camera of course and medium to high density screen of 800x400 min.
Open source solutions (server to receive the uploads, code to do the transcoding, server to do the streaming) are preferred, but not required.
CDN's are an option, but I don't think that really figures in to the picture right now.
Check out this page to see all the video formats that Android supports for encoding and decoding.
http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html
For encoding use FFmpeg or a service like encoding.com