Add user agent workaround for YouTube TV

[MrSol0]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
My problem is that our TV script that was based on Youtube TV no longer works because youtube limited access to unothorized devices, to fix that i need to add a new user-agent.

Describe the solution you'd like
i want to be able to edit the user-agent, maybe using SetBrowserProperty to be able to change it to something like "Mozilla/5.0 (SMART-TV; Linux; Tizen 4.0.0.2) AppleWebkit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) SamsungBrowser/9.2 TV Safari/605.1.15", and then i will be able to access youtube.com/tv for our Smart TV.

Describe alternatives you've considered
N/A

Additional context
N/A

[Dutchman101]

Even though it would be practical for some scripters, I doubt if it would be appropiate for MTA to facilitate breaching the YouTube ToS/circumvent something that Google has put in place for their own reasons.

For more information, refer to:

1. https://www.slashgear.com/youtube-is-discontinuing-its-tv-interface-for-web-browsers-13591695/
2. https://mashable.com/article/youtube-leanback-shutting-down/

By now these changes have taken effect, and as we know this broke plenty of scripts around MTA.

They seem to have specific reasons for keeping it working on certain user agents (like the ones you mentioned), and if they cannot block non-smart TV access in a more reliable way, the last thing we want is that MTA's CEF will be detected and restricted by YouTube because of work-arounds.

I think that if a new browser property (to manipulate user agent) will be requested at a time where this situation isn't actual, and without this workaround as the main motivation, it would be pretty much welcomed as an useful feature.

By the way, this post is entirely my personal opinion.

[MrSol0]

Even though it would be practical for some scripters, I doubt if it would be appropiate for MTA to facilitate breaching the YouTube ToS/circumvent something that Google has put in place for their own reasons.

For more information, refer to:

1. https://www.slashgear.com/youtube-is-discontinuing-its-tv-interface-for-web-browsers-13591695/
2. https://mashable.com/article/youtube-leanback-shutting-down/

By now these changes have taken effect, and as we know this broke plenty of scripts around MTA.

They seem to have specific reasons for keeping it working on certain user agents (like the ones you mentioned), and if they cannot block non-smart TV access in a more reliable way, the last thing we want is that MTA's CEF will be detected and restricted by YouTube because of work-arounds.

I think that if a new browser property (to manipulate user agent) will be requested at a time where this situation isn't actual, and without this workaround as the main motivation, it would be pretty much welcomed as an useful feature.

By the way, this post is entirely my personal opinion.

i disagree and btw there is no way for youtube to restrict or even detect MTA's CEF as it's like any other browser, not just that but there is apps in the google store that do that, that are there for some times now. i think this will benefit many people and my case is no exception, i advice MTA Team side with the developers and enable us to do more instead of trying to find reasons that have no merit to block it, and i don't think this breaks any ToS, it's just a feature.

thanks.

[qaisjp]

I...

• suspect a reason they blocked access for regular browsers is to absolve themselves of the responsibility to keep things stable for regular browsers.
• don't think it's technically possible for Google to block MTA without blocking all of CEF - they can via user agent, but I doubt they would
• am not sure of the implications of letting servers change the user-agent, but think that we could hardcode a user-agent switch for youtube.com/tv URLs

Pull requests welcome (if you can figure out exactly what string they are looking for in the user agent)

[qaisjp]

SMART-TV; Tizen 4.0 is the minimal user agent to get YouTube TV to work:

curl "https://www.youtube.com/tv" -v --user-agent "SMART-TV; Tizen 4.0"

And it works if you simply append the above string to the user agent:

curl "https://www.youtube.com/tv" -v --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.142 Safari/537.36; SMART-TV; Tizen 4.0"

assuming that CEF Forum • How to get default user agent? is accurate