YouTube online videos not working! (older: Jan 2013)

[sacrament055]

I would suspect those other devices have official support for Youtube via an API where as Sage was likely parsing their webpage.

Just a guess though.

[Shield]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I took a quick look at this to see if there was an easy fix. I think YouTube changed the format uf the URL needed to retrieve videos but that's about as far as I got. I'll try to look at it a little more over the next few days but no promises.

What's strange is I have a Sony TV with a 2010 firmware that YouTube still works on as well as a WD playback device - with firmware at least 6 months old. Both play Youtube videos just fine. They must be accessing it a different way or something?

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Shield

What's strange is I have a Sony TV with a 2010 firmware that YouTube still works on as well as a WD playback device - with firmware at least 6 months old. Both play Youtube videos just fine. They must be accessing it a different way or something?

yes - that is interesting, isn't it? I too have a few old devices that access youtube just fine. have Google stuck some code in to deny Sage users on purpose?

[cheekymonkey]

I've had a bit of a look at this but have got a bit lost, I can see in the debugs where it has a problem, but have not been able to get it working playing around in SageTV7.xml


Sat 9/29 10:54:26.096 [AWT-EventQueue-0@73a34b] YouTube: VideoFinderLinkEnd of <&> not found in line, trying VideoFinderLinkEndAlt of <\u0026> instead.


Maybe this fix could be of some help to the gurus
https://github.com/facanferff/showti...c90a40944e4390

[mkanet]

I had made a perfect image backup of a fully working SageTV installation of SageTV 7.1.9 final.

After I restored it, the first thing I did was update the STV to the latest version.. it was one version behind only.

After that, I tried playing youtube videos. When I press PLAY, they will all say:

"The media download failed". Error: The request media file was not found on the server"

How can I fix this? We use Youtube every day!

[mkanet]

I've been beating my brains out trying to get youtube to work after I restored SageTV from back in October 2011. It looks like this problem started coincidentally right when I was restoring my server and sageTV. I had no idea that youtube broke again. I thought it was just Google weather that was broken.

Is there any way to patch this temporarily until there's a more official fix? We use youtube several times a day at our house hold.

[Thomas Wischgol]

It looks like YouTube changed its feeds so that they now point to a web page with their embedded player in it. Before it had a URL to the video instead of that web page URL so that Sage could just play that file. I looked at the YouTube API but I cannot see an easy way around that. You would pretty much have to process the web page with the embedded player and extract the links from there. This is of course possible but probably needs to be done within Sage since the standard way of using rss feeds in Sage does not handle something like this right now.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Thomas Wischgol

It looks like YouTube changed its feeds so that they now point to a web page with their embedded player in it. Before it had a URL to the video instead of that web page URL so that Sage could just play that file. I looked at the YouTube API but I cannot see an easy way around that. You would pretty much have to process the web page with the embedded player and extract the links from there. This is of course possible but probably needs to be done within Sage since the standard way of using rss feeds in Sage does not handle something like this right now.

I didn't get as far debugging this as you did, but if this is correct I may be able to use some of the code I developed for the NaviX plugin to parse the web page but it will be a lot of work....

[mkanet]

Please forgive me if this sounds very naive. I'm sure I'm missing something very basic which, I guess, goes without saying for developers (unfortunately, I'm not a software developer). But, doesn't the Youtube API provide the java libraries and documentation examples for playing back these videos?

One interesting thing I noticed, all the websites that used to provide a direct FLV download for Youtube videos just recently switched to a requiring the need of a java applet (which I'm guessing is part of the java libraries provided in the API).

Im curious what method all the Youtube downloader Web browser plugins use. I'm guessing from browser cache? The most popular web browser video downloader plugins seem to have an update within a day.

Here are a couple of working javascripts (updated recently) which expose the full URL to the FLVs; and, seem to use the same method as other youtube downloader plugins (without java applets):
http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/30395
http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/98782

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Please forgive me if this sounds very naive. I'm sure I'm missing something very basic which, I guess, goes without saying for developers (unfortunately, I'm not a software developer). But, doesn't the Youtube API provide the java libraries and documentation examples for playing back these videos?

One interesting thing I noticed, all the websites that used to provide a direct FLV download for Youtube videos just recently switched to a requiring the need of a java applet (which I'm guessing is part of the java libraries provided in the API).

Im curious what method all the Youtube downloader Web browser plugins use. I'm guessing from browser cache? The most popular web browser video downloader plugins seem to have an update within a day.

Here are a couple of working javascripts (updated recently) which expose the full URL to the FLVs; and, seem to use the same method as other youtube downloader plugins (without java applets):
http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/30395
http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/98782

The Youtube APIs are for getting access to the youtube feeds, and user settings, they do not provide a means to getting the direct video url. They do provide the youtube url, but that's not the same thing as the video url. Typically getting the "real" video url requires a bit of scraping, and other magic. But like all magic, sometimes it doesn't work, and when it doesn't it means that people have to reengineer the solution all over again. Youtube doesn't want ANYONE scraping the videos, and as such, they don't make it trivial.

[Opus4]

Yes, this update was more difficult than usual -- it took me a couple hours to get the links working again. I have to test more to see how solid this fix is before deciding to put it out.

- Andy

[mkanet]

Andy, I really envy your technical ability. In just two hours!? Thanks so much for all your effort.

Originally Posted by Opus4

Yes, this update was more difficult than usual -- it took me a couple hours to get the links working again. I have to test more to see how solid this fix is before deciding to put it out.

- Andy

[checkbin]

Yes Andy is quite the Sage genius, being able to figure it out in a couple of hours. Where would we be without you? Looking forward to your fix. Thank you.

Checkbin

[JParedis]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Yes, this update was more difficult than usual -- it took me a couple hours to get the links working again. I have to test more to see how solid this fix is before deciding to put it out.

- Andy

Where is the box for donations

If fixed, would that mean that the "Trailer search" would also work again? I use that a lot to remind we what a movie was about. That would be great

I have been looking for a future replacement of my Sage installation, as one day support will have to reduce to below workable. But haven't found any product matching up the ease of installation, use, functionality and active user community. I hope we'll get still this type of support for some while.

[mkanet]

Yes, the Movie Trailer plugin should work once Youtube Video playback is restored. Music video playback feature in Slimplayer will start to work as well. I would be more than happy to donate generously if I could; especially, with all the use my family gets out of it.

Originally Posted by JParedis

Where is the box for donations

If fixed, would that mean that the "Trailer search" would also work again? I use that a lot to remind we what a movie was about. That would be great

I have been looking for a future replacement of my Sage installation, as one day support will have to reduce to below workable. But haven't found any product matching up the ease of installation, use, functionality and active user community. I hope we'll get still this type of support for some while.

[Opus4]

The downloadable STV updates for v7's SageTV7 and SageTV3 STVs and v6's SageTV3 STV are now available.

- Andy

[Oddity]

Thank you family now happy again, and myself of course.

Appreciate your continued support

[mkanet]

It works great!!! I just tried it from work via placeshifter to playback movie trailers. The MKANET family is very thankful!!

[gilded07]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The downloadable STV updates for v7's SageTV7 and SageTV3 STVs and v6's SageTV3 STV are now available.

- Andy

Thanks so much!!

[cheekymonkey]

Thanks heaps