We thought that Totem was living in a soft, gray, area by using YouTube GData API to do video searches, and then accessing direct streams that were of the quality expected by users, and in formats that meant out-of-the-box support for most Linux distributions (eg. using Web-M).
Turns out not. I won't make a whole scene about the way that this problem was brought up to me, but let's say that it wasn't the way I would have expected a corporation like Google dealing with things.
After a multitude of e-mails back and forth, I'm afraid that YouTube stuck to its guns, and I was repeatedly told about the "supported" solutions (embedding Flash was even proposed as a solution!).
So Totem will soon be playing your YouTube videos in crappy quality. Some of you with faster computers and better connections will be switching from full-HD streams to 176x144 videos.
If you want decent desktop integration with high-quality streams, feel free to "star" this GData bug report.
14 comments:
"Don't be evil" - muhahaha.
It's been starred. Thanks for hard work
It's their site. They can do what they like. Don't like it? Upload your videos somewhere else.
I wonder if one of these days they'll discover youtube-dl.
Sadly, I kinda have to agree with the third commenter. May be we should look for alternative that are more FOSS friendly? Anyone got any suggestions?
Anonymous guy looking for an alternative...have you considered Blip.tv? As far as I know, they support Ogg Theora and WebM uploading. :)
From the FAQ [0], blip.tv is geared toward Web Show and have pretty strong restriction on what can be uploaded.
[0] http://blip.tv/faq#content
Ah, thanks for pointing to the commit we will have to revert. Could you enclose it in #ifdefs somehow, or maybe enable/disable it with a GConf key?
The problem isn't so much with uploading content (Totem doesn't support that yet), but rather with accessing existing content.
np237: No, not if we want Google giving money to the GNOME Foundation, and GNOME participating in the Summer Of Codes and similar projects.
Maybe you should stop accepting money from them and start a GNOME SoC instead of using the GSoC.
Anon,
Such decisions with regard to other interactions points between Google and GNOME at the institutional level would not actually solve the problem with regard to enforcing terms of service in youtube. If anything it would only serve to close off lines of communication making harder to discuss a way forward that was better for all users and developers.
-jef
Well, it's not your job to enforce Google's TOS, it's the user breaching them, not you. Tools like clive are out there just fine.
Must say the most interesting "bug" here is the people bug. Should we really need to educate people on how to behave in a bugreport/issuetracker if we comment on it in a blog? Looking at the linked issue you may almost think so...
Anonymous: Nothing much that I can do about people not reading comments in bugs...
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