How to Watch Restricted YouTube Videos

youtube_restriction
Some YouTube videos have geographical restrictions, which prevent them from being viewed by people outside some particular country. Usually, this is because the person or the company which uploaded the video doesn’t have enough rights for global distribution. Luckily, there is a very simply work around, which can bypass this restriction.

Every YouTube video has a unique 11 character VIDEOID, which identifies the video. All you need to do is replace http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID with http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID. Basically, you are directly asking your browser to fetch the video in a large embedded player (which doesn’t check your location), so you can view the video, even if it’s restricted in your country.

You can try the above trick on this video, which is blocked outside United States. The URL of the video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ciR9qR1dU, but folks living outside United States can also watch it using this URL: http://www.youtube.com/v/I9ciR9qR1dU.

[Via: Google OS]

This post was published by on April 19, 2008

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://www.mobilejgames.com MobileJGames

    Nice tip Thilak, will be really useful. :)

  • http://green-flamingo.com Nathaniel

    Cool. An interesting trick to know. How did you find out?

  • http://www.greatpriceshere.com Nicole Price

    Neat. Very useful advise. Thank you.

  • http://theofftopic.com/ The Off Topic

    Very useful post…. time to watch more tv shows!!

  • http://talkingincircles.net probabilityzero

    I’ve never actually run into that error, but it’s good to know how to get around it.

  • http://www.gadgets4nowt.co.uk Wii

    Great tip, how on Earth did you find that out?

  • http://ingeek.blogspot.com SEO Man

    Awesome trick!!

  • http://txpress.blogspot.com Vijeesh

    Doesn’t work anymore. Google has fixed it…..

  • http://www.free-games-console.co.uk Ps3 Gamer

    Nice one!