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Oct 19

Helpful Tip: How to Watch Restricted YouTube Videos

Posted in: Today's Chili, videos, Web Sites, YouTube

This article was written on April 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

restricted videos Some of you may have experienced this before: you go to watch a video on YouTube only to get a message saying “This video is not available in your country.” Unfortunately there are some videos that people in certain countries aren’t able to watch because the person/company that added the video put geographical restrictions on it. With a very simple change in the URL, you’ll now be able to watch those videos without any problems.

This tip comes from the Google Operating System Blog who explains that all you have to do is replace the original URL which would look something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID with a URL that looks something like this:

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

And of course you know that the video ID would be the 11-character set of numbers and letters that are in a video URL, right? Essentially what you’re doing with this trick is entering in the URL of a video as though it was being embedded. When you enter in the modified URL and press enter, you’ll see a player maximized to your browser. Apparently YouTube hasn’t figured out a way to verify your country if you watch a video using the embedded video player.

If you’re wanting to try this out for yourself and you live outside of the United States, this Madonna video will be a good example. The normal URL for this video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU and so to get it to work outside of the United States, you’d need to enter the following URL: