Invidio.us embed doesn't allow clicking through to Invidio.us when Google domains blocked

[ajvsol]

If you block youtube.com and googlevideo.com domains then you get just a picture reading "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported."

There's no way to click through to watch the video on Invidio.us and right-clicking the video doesn't bring up any additional options either.

[omarroth]

Hi! Currently Invidious pulls videos from googlevideo.com. The reason why you're seeing this error is because all the sources for the video are being blocked. There's some more information provided here, but to paraphrase it's more bandwidth-intensive for the site to proxy videos. With #34 the videos will be proxied through Invidious so this won't be an issue, but unfortunately both the site and the embeds currently use googlevideo.com links.

[Jtasiu]

With #34 the videos will be proxied through Invidious so this won't be an issue

That sound amazing @omarroth! Is it really possible without too much bandwidth costs?

[omarroth]

Well, that remains to be seen. Currently thumbnails don't add that much extra cost, but they're much smaller. I think in the coming week I'll probably push experimental 1080p to registered users, and then site-wide depending on bandwidth usage.

[dimqua]

Is it REALLY necessary to proxy 1080p videos to have a support of them? After all, youtube-dl doesn't proxy anything.

[omarroth]

There's more info here, but to paraphrase: because of the way 1080p+ videos are packaged, it is very preferable to use something like DASH to combine the audio and video streams. DASH has some other technical requirements that can only be met by proxying the video files. Sorry for the somewhat round-about answer, but I have looked into this quite a bit and I think that proxying files is the solution in this case. Obviously the increased bandwidth usage is not ideal.

The reason youtube-dl doesn't proxy anything because it has full control over the requests it makes and how the files are combined. When in the browser, you have to work with/around CORS, which makes it difficult to directly request files from googlevideo.com (when they are provided seperately).

@PrestonN provides a good explanation here.
There's also an explanation by @cloudrac3r here.

Short answer is yes, it is necessary. :)

[dimqua]

Hmm, doesn't linked @cloudrac3r's comment means that he already found a some sort of solution for this issue?

[omarroth]

Yes, @cloudrac3r's solution is to sync the audio and video manually. That is also the solution that @PrestonN considers in his linked comment as well. The problem with syncing it manually is that it gets very messy very quickly. Keeping audio and video in sync when quality changes, speed changes, among other things makes it difficult to pull off.

[cloudrac3r]

I haven't found a situation where I haven't been able to play 1080p+, and more often that not it works without an issue, but there are times when I have to fiddle with the pause button to hear sound or to get it to synchronise properly.

Proxying videos on Invidious was already a requested feature — using that to play DASH videos the proper way is obviously the best move.

[omarroth]

You can currently view videos without connecting Google domains by enabling Proxy videos? in your preferences or by setting default quality to dash, so I'm going to close this.

[ajvsol]

This doesn't appear to work for embedded videos (e.g. using the Invidious Embed extension) without googlevideo.com also being allowed. Videos viewed through invidio.us directly however seem to be proxied fully.

[omarroth]

You may have to clarify what you mean. User preferences are not used when watching an embedded video, but adding local=true as I mentioned appears to work as expected, example: https://invidio.us/embed/aqz-KE-bpKQ?local=true .

I'm not opposed to using user preferences in embeds. I'd recommend opening a new issue for that to further discussion.

[ajvsol]

Ah I thought it was still related to the original issue since embeds still don't work fully but I can open a new issue.