Playing YouTube videos. Has YouTube changed things?

[roystonlodge]

(I did a search for this topic, but I didn't find any threads that cover this question. If it has already been discussed, I apologize.)

The IT department at my job will not allow Flash to be installed on our computers. So, in order to watch YouTube videos I have always used VLC Media Player.

It was quite simple. I could simply paster the YouTube url into the "Play Network Stream" menu and it worked perfectly. It was also easy to use VLC to save a copy of the video to my desktop, which I often did with high definition videos that didn't play well when being streamed.

However, this method stopped working a little while ago. Now, when I try to play a YouTube URL, nothing happens. I don't even get an error message.

Has YouTube changed the way they stream their videos, to prevent users from viewing them outside of a webbrowser? Or maybe one of the recent VLC updates removed this functionality?

(Or perhaps my IT department simply found a way to block video traffic...)

Is there a way for me to change the settings in VLC to get this functionality back? Perhaps I have to change the URL in some way to get it to play?

As a workaround, I've been downloading my YouTube videos using http://www.keep-tube.com, and then playing the local file. This method works fine, and actually takes less time than using VLC to create local copies of YouTube videos.

But I'd still like to know if anybody has any information on why YouTube URLs no longer play in VLC. Simple curiosity, I suppose.

Thanks in advance!

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

The most up-to-date version of the script is found in VLC 1.0.3 (dated October 23).

[roystonlodge]

Thank you! I'm using the portable version of VLC that I got from www.portableapps.com, and it was only 1.0.2.

I've upgraded to 1.0.3 and now it works perfectly. Thanks!