Issue: After clicking play on a video, an END message is displayed in the player window. As well, in the playlist, the video shows an ERROR message.
Reason: Some of the videos coming from YouTube require a digital signature and CoSo
has no way to detect which videos require this signature.
This is how it worked before the Google changes that were made in early December 2017:
1. The CoSo server loads the SWF file (YouTube’s player from Google).
2. The CoSo sever decompiles the SWF, extracts an encryption method, and then sends it to the client app (YouTube Pod).
3. The YouTube Pod would generate a signature using this encryption method.
Why it doesn’t work in the current versions:
Google removed Flash support and all the references to their SWF files. Due to this, CoSo can no longer CoSo get the encryption method. This also means that we are also not able to get the signature.
As a workaround, CoSo has tried using the latest available SWF from Google, which doesn’t do the trick.
CoSo did investigate grabbing the signature from the HTML player itself (from the proxy, for example) and using it in the YouTube Pod; however, we found that the signature generation is based on a list of multiple parameters, which are unknown to us, and it has a connection with the request.
Solution/Workaround: Unfortunately, there is no solution or workaround for this issue at this time.