Question: How does Youtube-dl bypass ISP Restrictions

[steelbrain]

Youtube has been blocked by my ISP (Yeah it sucks) and I am surprised that Youtube-dl still successfully grabs i.
I tried the verbosity settings and it extract data from this kind-of urls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmEJZofz2s&gl=US&hl=en&has_verified=1&bpctr=9999999999 but how does it work if it's blocked?

Note: The link it extracts from -j do not work in a browser.

[phihag]

youtube-dl is not magical, although we try our best to work around censorship when we can. We don't do any specific evasion for the YouTube service though. Without a more detailed output I can't tell what's going on.

The link you get with -g (or by parsing the JSON in -j) should be valid with any downloader though, including your web browser. So are you sure the censorship is done by your ISP, and not in your web browser?

[steelbrain]

@phihag turns out that some subdomains of googlevideo.com are blocked, not all of them. Thanks!