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bandal
Visitor

RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

Youtube related links are disabled now. RateRix Channel no longer works and others that have links to Youtube do not work. Anyone else see the same thing?
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21 REPLIES 21
7fWo8QirCv
Channel Surfer

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

Same here. Youtube quit working and RateRix is worthless, it's broken too.
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TheEndless
Channel Surfer

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

This has absolutely nothing to do with the latest firmware upgrade. It's due to a change on YouTube/Google's end.
My Channels: http://roku.permanence.com - Twitter: @TheEndlessDev
Instant Watch Browser (NetflixIWB), Aquarium Screensaver (AQUARIUM), Clever Clocks Screensaver (CLEVERCLOCKS), iTunes Podcasts (ITPC), My Channels (MYCHANNELS)
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marcelo_cabral
Roku Guru

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

I have the same problem with a private channel I have that access Youtube. Will try to debug later today to understand what's going on.

I will post here when I have news.
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bandal
Visitor

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

Error 403 Forbidden is the debug info.
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marcelo_cabral
Roku Guru

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

Looks like the Youtube is redirecting the video to some "cache" servers, based on your internet provider. In my case the url shows "comcast" and when we try to access this url directly it shows the 403 error.
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bandal
Visitor

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

That sucks for my channel creation now as my customers don't want to remake hundreds of youtube videos to go along with regular videos within the Channel. Not sure whats the difference playing youtube on my PC versus the Roku. It streams the same videos. My work around is to download the youtube videos and place on my server for viewing.
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belltown
Roku Guru

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

YouTube hasn't changed their caching mechanism; they've changed how you specify the MP4 urls, by adding a 'signature' parameter. If you specify the url without the signature you'll get a 403 (forbidden) http errror. It should be a fairly simple change to get things working again. The value for the signature parameter is obtained from the 'sig=' field for the stream. I have some new coding for this, but I won't be able to test it until I get back into town on Thursday, so I don't want to publish it here yet.
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marcelo_cabral
Roku Guru

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

I fixed on my channel this way:

I used to get the mp4 url by parsing the html result from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID&feature=youtube_gdata
now I'm getting the url by parsing: http://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=VIDEOID&hl=en&gl=US&ptk=vevo&el=detailpage

Now it works!
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belltown
Roku Guru

Re: RateRix and other Channels with youtube not working

"marcelo.cabral" wrote:
I fixed on my channel this way:

I used to get the mp4 url by parsing the html result from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID&feature=youtube_gdata
now I'm getting the url by parsing: http://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=VIDEOID&hl=en&gl=US&ptk=vevo&el=detailpage

Now it works!


Yes, you can also get the urls from: http://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=VIDEOID&hl=en as the url in this case has the 'signature' param included, so you don't need to explicitly add it on. That might actually be better that what I was doing (parsing the whole web page obtained from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID), since get_video_info returns a much smaller set of information.
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