Bypassing Youtube Restrictions Easily

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Bypassing Youtube Restrictions Easily

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 4, 2008 ⋅

Ever been sent a Youtube link from a friend or relative only to find out it’s not viewable in your country? Rightly or wrongly, Youtube allows the content uploaders to restrict access to the video to specific countries or regions - usually identifiable by your IP address. This happens a great deal to those of us outside the US. Moreso, Youtube also flags certain videos that possibly contain inappropriate content, requiring users to login in order to verify they are 18 or older.

Having grown tired of This video is not available in your country and This video is inappropriate for some users I’ve found a rather clever and easy way around the situation.

Most Youtube videos have the form URL of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID

Where VIDEOID is a string of characters that uniquely indentifies every video on Youtube.

By changing the URL to:

http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID

You will be able to watch the video as you’d expect, albeit a bit oversized as this is the manner that Youtube videos are embedded into other websites.

What have we done simply? By removing watch? and substituting = with / we’ve circumvented Youtubes rather basic access restriction. Makes you wonder why they even bother?

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