YouTube Application Control customer feedback request

[eelsasser]

Yes, it looks like the embedded video player on any  of the main Channel landing pages will play that default feature video.

It's a complicated explanation, but it has to do with the fact that the content is actually pulled from the cache servers and the URL to retrieve the content from the CDN servers gets generated on the fly into the page when it is retrieved from youTube. The CDN URL has no relationship with the videoID that we lookup to get the video information.

if you click on any other video on a page, they are blocked. And even the currently playing one will be blocked if you click into the youtube page that actually holds it.

I've figured out a way to remove the embedded player itself from the surrounding channel's home page so they don't display at all, but I try to avoid that becuase it needs to open the HTML on the page a look through every <div> tag.

BTW, Andre and I both see all the posts, so it doesn't matter which one you respond to

[Former Member]

I stumbled on to the same issues on other pages (i.e. news sites and such).  We only want YouTube videos from our company to play and so far am just unable to get it to work exactly how we would like.  I have went back to the plan of whitelisting each link when our corporate communications department uploads another video.  I know YouTube is not an easy item to mess with and we are probably going to run into problems by whitelisting the actual link to the video...but unfortunately we have "bigger fish to fry" with our current deployment and this is severly slowing us down.  We need to block the Media Sharing and Streaming Media categories and that just seems to make everything a bit more tricky when trying to exempt YouTube.  If you have anything else to try, please let me know.

I appreciate all the help you and Andre have provided and again I definitely realize writing rules for YouTube just isn't an easy task.

[eelsasser]

Well, you can do this if you want.

Have a rule that strips out the player out of all Channel pages except the ones you want.

I have a rule like this that only shows the 'mcafeetechnical' videos:

So the main page comes out as this:

But any other page like walmart comes out like this:

Where their default video does not play.

Attached the individual rule and the whole youtube rule set, too.

Hit post too soon. on 10/23/12 4:13:22 PM EDT

[Former Member]

I hate to drag up a dead thread, but this seems the best place to ask the question.

We are likely going to be getting into the YouTube category blocking business here somewhat soon.  I'm curious if there has been any changes over the past year with how YouTube presents the categories?  Specifically if there is any hope that YouTube makes categorization information available in the actual CDN URL string? 

We aren't doing, or planning to do, SSL inspection any time in the near future, so we'll naturally miss those.  Even after an https request for a video, the actual streaming from the CDN is http, so I was hoping to catch the information there if at all possible.

We're only toying with the idea right now, so I've diabled the actual blocking by category (which does happily work) and am just writing out a timestamp+category log just to try and get some kind of a vague idea of what our users actually watch.  I can see the policy growing into something more sophisticated over time though.

[eelsasser]

The only way to get video categories is to have MWG do an API call into YouTube with the videoID and  get the metadata back out to parse.

That's what the rules do in the online rule set library.

YouTube hasn't changed this method and categories are not anywhere in the URI or anything. They did upgrade their API to v3 but there are constraints on using it. you have to "register" your application and be assigned an ID to use the API.

But you can still use the v2 method.