Youtube, please let me know the country availability of a given video. | Hacker News Reader

Youtube, please let me know the country availability of a given video.

dbasch.posterous.com

63 pointsdiego21 comments

...or just don't show it if it's not available. It is sort of interesting to know that information, but it's not like I have time or interest to contact the rights holder in some other territory and promote the potential economic gains of cross-border availability.

Also, I wish the same were true for mobile devices. I am heartily sick of being told 'x is not available on mobile' or spoofing the user agent string in my tablet to watch something. It's really none of a publisher's business where I choose to watch something and this attempt at artificial market segmentation is not worth the administrative overhead it imposes.

The suggested purpose of knowing that information is not so that you can correct the situation, it's so that you don't look foolish by sending links to videos that your audience can't view.

Not showing the video in the YouTube interface is only a partial fix, and an unrelated one at that. The use case in consideration is tweeted YouTube links; it's not like YouTube can just switch to a new video because the one which you navigated to isn't available.

True enough, but Twitter et al are global; my followers may or may not be able to see a video in a particular territory.

I am a newbie when it comes to mobile things, so I was surprised when I saw that some streaming websites "weren't available on mobile" when I tried to access them on my tablet. I could understand if they wanted to sell me some premium account or something, but typically they seem to just bar the gates.

Why do publishers do that?

I think it is to do with the format of the video. Many video sites convert the format to a mobile version so that it can work on devices...others however, may leave it in the format it was uploaded which may not work on some devices..

Actually their API already returns that information. I think this was it: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/reference.html#youtu...

Is there a way to access this information when browsing? An extension, perhaps?

I'm an embedded developer, so please forgive my ignorance if this is a foolish question.

Not completely straightforward, but you could do something like this if you have curl and libxml2 installed:

    curl -s https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/oHg5SJYRHA0?v=2 | xmllint --format - | grep media:restriction

The 'oHg5SJYRHA0' part is the video ID from the URL for the video.

Thanks. I updated the post and credited you. I posted this example (a Vevo video):

curl -s https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/eAfyFTzZDMM?v=2 | xmllint --format - | grep media:restriction

shows:

<media:restriction type="country" relationship="allow">BD BE BF BG BA BB WF BM BN BO BH BI BJ BT JM BW WS BR BS BY BZ RU RW RS TL RE TM TJ RO TK GW GU GT GR GQ GP GY GF GE GD GB GA SV GN GM GL GI GH OM TN IL JO HR HT HU HK HN VE PR PS PW PT PY IQ PA PF PG PE PK PN PL PM ZM EH EE EG ZA EC IT VN SB ET SO ZW SA ES ER ME MD MG MA MC UZ MM ML MO MN MH MK MU MT MW MV MQ MP MS MR UG MY MX VU FR SH FI FJ FK FM FO NI NL NO NA NC NE NG NP NR NU CK CI CH CO CN CM CL CA CG CF CD CZ CY CR CV CU SZ SY KG KE SR KI KH KN KM ST SK KR SI KP KW SN SM SL SC KZ KY SG SE SD DO DM DJ DK VG YE DZ US UY YT LB LC LA TV TW TT TR LK LI LV TO LT LU LR LS TF TG TD TC LY VA VC AE AD AG AF AI IS IR AM AL AO AN AQ AR AU AT IO IN TZ AZ IE UA QA MZ</media:restriction>

Or you can use fields filtering:

curl -s "https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/eAfyFTzZDMM?v=2&#...

Much cleaner. Thanks for the tip!

Made this: http://home.iitb.ac.in/~mayank.singhal/site/javascripts/Yout...

Well, this is my first chrome extension. So please pardon me if it has some really n00bish code.

This is a real pain point, even when just browsing around YouTube from a country like Germany. Probably half of the videos with some mainstream tune in it are 'not available in your country'. Feels like being tricked.

Dear YouTube, you know where I am. If I'm not allowed to see the bloody video, don't show it to me in search results or recommendations. Thanks.

I wonder if you could cheat with Where's It Up?

http://pro.wheresitup.com/

[disclaimer: i made the tool]

If you got a different page size, or response code, you could check different regions easily.

The page still loads, but the Video player displays a message rather than the video itself.

The thing that really gets me is when I visit one of these videos, and I can't even find out what the title of the video is.

How does one go about making their content on Youtube unavailable to one country? I don't see that anywhere in my settings on my videos, not that I'd want to limit it (which just seems silly, as it will only encourage piracy).

I'm a Youtube partner and I can't find the option, but I do remember seeing it somewhere. How strange, seems to have disappeared. I'll check the FAQs.

I'd also love to be able to blacklist accounts. I don't really need to see four different accounts from one person, especially if I _really_ don't want to see their videos.

On a similar theme, I wish Amazon would tell me earlier when an item won't be shipped to my location. You have to go right through to the purchasing stages to find out.

Seems like the solution is to download the video, upload it to YouTube, and tweet your version to your followers. By the time it gets flagged (if it gets flagged), it will be gone from everyone's Twitter feeds anyway.

When your YouTube account gets shut down for posting too many flagged videos, make another one. They're free.

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