Ever seen this little thing in your browser window letting you know that the video is blocked in your country? I bet you have. YouTube is notorious for excluding some of us out of our right to see a new performance of our favorite artist or a news video that our friend from overseas forwarded to us. It’s just that usually we don’t sweat it and move along with our lives very comfortable with being restricted by our own geographical location. But what if we want our internet laws to be a bit looser or rather bend the rules a little? I’m going to tell you just that.
Is there a way to watch blocked youtube videos?
The short answer is — yes. In fact, there are four ways to do this. And I’m going to explain all four of them. It’s up to you which way looks the most appealing to you. I, for one, like the first way the most.
VPN For Youtube
Let’s start with what a VPN is and where to put it. VPN, short for Virtual Private Network, is a service that allows you to connect to the internet via an encrypted tunnel to ensure your online privacy and protect your sensitive data. VPNs are commonly used to securely connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots, protect oneself from phishing attacks, allow undetected torrenting, and well of course bypassing geographical blocks — hence the name of this article.
There are many many VPNs out there, and it can be quite intimidating deciding which one to choose. So I’m going to tell you about my favorite ones, and then you can go off and do some more research if you’d like.
Best VPNs for bypassing YouTube’s regional filter
aka get past a ‘The uploader has not made this video available in your country’ error message
This one is my personal favorite because it crosses out the things that I want in a VPN, all the while having user-friendly apps and very quirky and beautiful illustrations (an example is their YouTube page). It ensures security and anonymity online, offers DNS and IP leak protection, has a strict no-logs policy, and they are based in a privacy friendly location. Surfshark also has fast servers, built-in kill-switch and ad-blocker, supports torrenting, offers 24/7 customer support and 30-day money-back guarantee, GPS spoofing (for android devices) and most importantly — lets you bypass all of the geo-blocks you come across along the internet including YouTube’s error messages mentioned in the heading. You can buy a subscription right here with an 83% discount.
NordVPN is another excellent option for bypassing geo-blocks. It works with major streaming platforms. They have fast servers, are secure, and pretty easy to use. NordVPN doesn’t collect logs, uses industry-leading encryption and offers a kill-switch. In addition to that NordVPN supports torrents, offers 24/7 customer support, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re interested in giving them a try, here it is with a discount.
CyberGhost is another one that can make your geo-blocks be bygones. You can easily set them up on any device, they do not collect logs, support 5 simultaneous devices on one account, have a built-in kill-switch, have a strong encryption and fast servers worldwide. CyberGhost also offers 24/7 customer support and a 45-day money-back guarantee. Get them here.
Last but definitely not least — ExpressVPN. It has good speeds and a network spanning 94 countries. It can crack many of those streaming platforms so you can enjoy more content every day, has strong encryption, and a built-in kill-switch. ExpressVPN is really easy to use and has apps for major platforms. Furthermore, it doesn’t collect logs, allows torrenting, allows 5 simultaneous devices on one account. You can get it right here.
YouTube Region Bypass
And here is one more way to get this youTube thing going. Let’s say you don’t have a VPN and for some reason you don’t want to get it. You can try this trick, it works in most cases.
There’s two ways of going about it.
First. It could be enough just to change the YouTube video URL. For example, the blocked YouTube video URL is like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9AYPxH5NTM
You need to replace “watch?v=” with “v/”, and the YouTube video URL becomes https://www.youtube.com/v/Z9AYPxH5NTM
After that, you can watch blocked YouTube videos successfully.
If that doesn’t work you can try another way to bypass YouTube regional filters. Hooktube. Hooktube is like a YouTube mirror site. That is to say, Hooktube is a Youtube alternative. With it, you can watch all videos on Youtube without regional restrictions. There’s just a couple of steps of doing this.
Open the HookTube site to access its main interface.
Type the blocked YouTube video’s title in the search bar and hit the Enter
Then find the video and open it.
To make things easier, you can redirect your YouTube URL to Hooktube.
Open the blocked video on YouTube and find the address bar.
Replace “you” in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9AYPxH5NTM with “hook”, the video URL becomes https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=Z9AYPxH5NTM.
Proxy Server
Another alternative to a VPN is a proxy server. It works in a similar way as a VPN does, allowing you to browse as if in a different country, however, it’s less secure and doesn’t encrypt your traffic, which is why a VPN is a bit better for security reasons. If all you want to do is watch music videos on YouTube, encryption might not be your biggest concern, but if you’re trying to access YouTube from a country with a repressive government that bans certain videos, a VPN is definitely a better option.
There are free servers around, but they’re usually very limited so it makes a paid service worth the money. And if it has a free trial, well that’s even better. You’ll typically have to access the server through a web browser extension, and select a server. Then just load up YouTube and now you’re done. If I had to choose. There are plenty of different providers, but I would recommend something like Smartproxy or Kproxy.
Download YouTube videos
Last but not least — download whichever video you’d like. If for some reason none of the ways shown before can satisfy your YouTube needs you can always try downloading the YouTube video that you’re not allowed to see. There are many ways to do it, there are a few tools and extensions, but probably the easiest one is to just write ss before YouTube in your URL like so: https://www.ssyoutube.com/watch?v=njn6krU3tQ8 and it will redirect you to savefrom.net website. Or you can try using something like Mini tool youtube downloader.
Source: https://medium.com/@benjamminharb/how-to-watch-blocked-youtube-videos-in-your-country-4b8e6a99c24e
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