Getting YouTube Videos to Play Using RealPlayer

[jamesjaddah1755]

I use the public library to download files and being unable to use Chrome and FireFox I managed to get Internet Explorer to download some videos from Youtube to my USB flash drive via Real Player.

Unfortunately when I attempt to play back using Real Player on the same computer from my flash drive I get nothing. The bar moves as though the video is playing, but the screen is blank.

Also, when I plug the USB drive into my own PC at home and attempt to play any of the videos either the audio is completely absent or the video is completely absent. (I use VLC Player at home because there is no way to install Real Player without an internet connection).

Since the library computers are completely locked via Administrative privileges any options are far as changing settings on them is not plausible so I'm hoping there is something else I can do to correct this problem.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

 

[Paul]

I use the public library to download files and being unable to use Chrome and FireFox I managed to get Internet Explorer to download some videos from Youtube to my USB flash drive via Real Player.

Unfortunately when I attempt to play back using Real Player on the same computer from my flash drive I get nothing. The bar moves as though the video is playing, but the screen is blank.

Also, when I plug the USB drive into my own PC at home and attempt to play any of the videos either the audio is completely absent or the video is completely absent. (I use VLC Player at home because there is no way to install Real Player without an internet connection).

Since the library computers are completely locked via Administrative privileges any options are far as changing settings on them is not plausible so I'm hoping there is something else I can do to correct this problem.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

The library should have Wifi. If you take a laptop
to the library, and connect to their Wifi, then you
can use Youtube Downloader software to make
copies of video content.

Visit your "gently used" computer center, to find
some sort of older laptop that has Wifi. Or, at
least buy a laptop with a USB2 port on it, then purchase
a USB2 Wifi dongle, to convert the laptop into a Wifi
capable platform.

The library Wifi router may block content, but at least
for Youtube, I would expect it to still work. At our
public library, for the longest while they had a
"freedom rules" policy on internet content. This
was recently changed, so that there would not be
any more incidents of children seeing things on
library computers, that they should not be seeing.
The library computers are not arranged to prevent
"shoulder surfing", and the content some clients
were viewing, would be a problem for children walking
behind the computer in question. Rather than arrange
private viewing rooms for each computer (thus reducing
the total number of computers), it was easier to just
install some kind of Parental Watch software. The concern
wasn't actually with students typing in URLs to sites
like that on their own, but with the shoulder surfing
aspect.

Sites like Youtube, do not use "vanilla flash". That's
why downloader applications that do things like copy
data out of system memory, are used. That's to get around
any protection methods.

I'm not a big video guy, but at least one video format
I was trying to capture, it was encrypted. But, the key
was shipped to the client computer, as part of the session.
(If you sniff all the packets with Wireshark, the key
is somewhere in the pcap file.) And someone explained how
you could go about capturing the key, and applying it to
the video content. At this point though, I was too annoyed
to even bother. So even if you capture what you think
is all of the data containing stuff, it can still be
protected by an encryption scheme. These schemes are
also changed regularly - a change to Youtube in
mid-January, caused howls of protect from the downloader
crowd, as at least one of their downloader tools stopped
working. It's a continuous battle, to make the content
into something you can capture. And considering the
quality of what I see on Youtube, it just isn't worth
the effort.

If you have your own laptop to take to the library,
you'll be better able to participate in the fun.

Paul

 

[David]

At Wed, 29 Jan 2014 15:52:47 -0800, jamesjaddah1755 rearranged some
electrons to write:

I use the public library to download files and being unable to use
Chrome and FireFox I managed to get Internet Explorer to download some
videos from Youtube to my USB flash drive via Real Player.

Unfortunately when I attempt to play back using Real Player on the same
computer from my flash drive I get nothing. The bar moves as though the
video is playing, but the screen is blank.

Also, when I plug the USB drive into my own PC at home and attempt to
play any of the videos either the audio is completely absent or the
video is completely absent. (I use VLC Player at home because there is
no way to install Real Player without an internet connection).

Since the library computers are completely locked via Administrative
privileges any options are far as changing settings on them is not
plausible so I'm hoping there is something else I can do to correct this
problem.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Darren Harris Staten Island, New York.

There are several websites out there that will allow you to pull a video
from Youtube and save it in a variety of formats, (MP4, WMV, etc.)

http://keepvid.com/ is an example of one of them.

Navigate to one of these websites, download and save in the format that
you want to your USB drive.