Thursday, 13 January 2011

YouTube playback will suck again

If you've seen the comments on this PiTiVi bug, you're probably already aware that YouTube/Google strongly disapprove of any breach to their terms of service.

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.
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14 comments:

  1. Mathias13 January 2011 at 18:37

    "Don't be evil" - muhahaha.

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  2. Anonymous13 January 2011 at 18:58

    It's been starred. Thanks for hard work

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  3. Anonymous13 January 2011 at 19:21

    It's their site. They can do what they like. Don't like it? Upload your videos somewhere else.

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  4. Nirbheek13 January 2011 at 22:48

    I wonder if one of these days they'll discover youtube-dl.

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  5. Anonymous13 January 2011 at 23:16

    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?

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  6. Sean14 January 2011 at 01:38

    Anonymous guy looking for an alternative...have you considered Blip.tv? As far as I know, they support Ogg Theora and WebM uploading. :)

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  7. Anonymous14 January 2011 at 07:42

    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

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  8. Anonymous14 January 2011 at 08:40

    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?

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  9. Bastien Nocera14 January 2011 at 11:08

    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.

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  10. Anonymous14 January 2011 at 12:27

    Maybe you should stop accepting money from them and start a GNOME SoC instead of using the GSoC.

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  11. Jef Spaleta14 January 2011 at 21:26

    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

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  12. Kevin Kofler15 January 2011 at 11:19

    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.

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  13. Anonymous16 January 2011 at 22:54

    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...

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  14. Bastien Nocera17 January 2011 at 16:55

    Anonymous: Nothing much that I can do about people not reading comments in bugs...

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