I need to see the monkey smelling his finger!!!

April 6, 2008 7:48 PM

Using Youtube without using the front page, or any other methods of getting around Chinese censorship.

I need to put some videos up on Youtube, but I am in China. They've opened youtube back up, but it will go down for a few seconds every time a questionable video goes up.

Since the front page of Youtube automatically cycles through videos, it is going down all the time, and it seems to always default to the front page every time I log in. Is there a way to use youtube, while never going to the front page, or is there some switch i can throw and make the front page of youtube cleaner and more google like.

posted by afu to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Why don't you just google a random video on youtube, bookmark it, and use that link when you want to access youtube? It's not like there's anything you need on the front page. Here's an innocuous one you can use.
posted by 1 at 8:26 PM on April 6, 2008

If you do a Google search for Youtube, you can search Youtube directly from the Google search results. See for yourself.
posted by Effigy2000 at 8:36 PM on April 6, 2008

Anonymouse?
posted by Class Goat at 8:43 PM on April 6, 2008

If you're willing to pay, you can buy a hosted virtual server here in the U.S. (I have one that's about $19/mo) and set it up to run as a secured VPN server. All your traffic would be encrypted and you'd tunnel out and it will be just like surfing from the U.S.
posted by delmoi at 9:36 PM on April 6, 2008

Alright # 1 I totally set myself up for that. The problem with using a sweet Astley groove as a starting page is that I have to sign up a bunch of new people for Youtube accounts and every time I set up a new account it goes to the front page automatically. Youtube seems to load the front page a lot for no practical reason.

I've found Anonymouse is too slow for youtube.

I've been meaning to set up a VPN for awhile and it would work, but since everything else on youtube besides the front page seems to work, I was hoping for a quick solution.
posted by afu at 11:11 PM on April 6, 2008

Can you use one communal account for all those people? Is there a reason everyone needs a separate account and why all those accounts all need to go through you?
posted by Phire at 4:16 PM on April 7, 2008

Speed of the connection doesn't matter with Youtube. It isn't "streaming video" as such. It downloads the entire video in FLV format which is then locally buffered. If you use Anonymouse, just pause the playback when it begins, and wait until most or all of the video has been downloaded. Less fast than other solutions, sure, but it's easy, it's free, and it's available to you now.
posted by Class Goat at 1:01 AM on April 8, 2008