A Little Trick to Watch Geographically Restricted Videos

A few days ago we P2POn posted an article titled “Geographic Restrictions Might Lead to Piracy” pointing out to the urgent need of some changes in this direction. While waiting for the actual sites that impose such restrictions to do something about this problem we thought it would be a good idea to offer a tip. Surely many of you have come across this problem of availability when trying to watch a YouTube video as there are some videos out there that fall under the geographic restrictions we mentioned in that previous post. Well, you can say goodbye to this bugger now – a little change made in the URL and those videos will be watchable.

This info is courtesy of the Google Operating System Blog who tells us how easy is to deal with this inconvenience – by replacing the original URL whose appearance would be something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID with a URL that looks similar to this: http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID – your problem should be solved.

No need to tell you folks that the video ID would be the 11-character set of numbers and letters included in a video URL, is there? If you wonder how come this works – well, basically you’re entering in the URL of a video as though it was being embedded. Once you’ve entered the URL in this form and pressed enter, a player is displayed as YouTube can’t do any checking of your country if you watch a video using the embedded video player.

Just give it a try.