Question

I am wondering whether any of you have ever come accross a solution/function that allows embedding YouTube videos with a fallback solution where an alternative video source is selected if YouTube videos – and the videos only! – are blocked.

One of our corporate clients have access to the web via a proxy server that weeds out flash content served form YouTube. More specifically anything served from ytimg.com is blocked. Since their website is quite heavy on product videos they find it annoying to boot that clients can watch videos on their site while their own staff can’t.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You should try to make an Ajax request to something hosted in youTube, i would say something like this:

function check_youtube() {
  $.ajax({
    type: 'GET',
    dataType: 'json',
    url: URL_ON_YOUTUBE,
    timeout: 5000,
    success: function(data, textStatus ){
       alert('Woot, Cat videos on the way!');
    },
    error: function(xhr, textStatus, errorThrown){
       alert('Ooops, You suck, proxy blocking your way');
    }
  });
}