EDIT 22 March 2011 : This question is no longer that relevant since Youtube

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Asked: May 15, 20262026-05-15T23:21:00+00:00 2026-05-15T23:21:00+00:00

EDIT 22 March 2011 : This question is no longer that relevant since Youtube

0

EDIT 22 March 2011: This question is no longer that relevant since Youtube now offers HTTPS access: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2011/02/https-support-for-youtube-embeds.html

Our application is run over HTTPS which rarely presents any problems for us. When it comes to youtube however, the fact that they do not present any content over SSL connections is giving us some head ache when trying to embed clips. Mostly because of Internet Explorers famous little warning message:

“Do you want to view only the webpage
content that was delivered securely?
This page contains content that will
not be delivered using a secure HTTPS
… etc”

I’ve tried to solve this in several ways. The most promising one was to use the ProxyPass functionality in Apache to map to YouTube.

Like this:

ProxyPass: /youtube/ http://www.youtube.com
ProxyPassReverse: /youtube/ http://www.youtube.com

This gets rid of the annoying warning. However, the youtube SWF fails to start streaming The SWF i manage to load into the browser simply states : “An error occurred, please try again later”.

Potential solutions are perhaps:

Download youtube FLV:s and serve them out of own domain (gah)
Use custom FLV-player and stream only FLV:s from youtube over a https proxy?

Update 10 March: I’ve tried to use Googles Youtube API for ActionScript to load a player. It looked promising at first and I was able to load a player through my https:// proxy. However, the SWF that is loaded contains loads of explicit calls to different non-ssl urls to create authentication links for the FLV-stream and for loading different crossdomain policies.

It really seems like we’re not supposed to access flv-streams directly. This makes it very hard to bypass the Internet Explorer warning, short of ripping out the FLV:s from youtube and serving them out of your own domain.

There are solutions out there for downloading youtubes FLV:s. But that is not compliant with the Youtube terms of use and is really not an option for us.