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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T15:26:26+00:00

I’ve written a small app to parse some RSS feeds from YouTube and launch

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I’ve written a small app to parse some RSS feeds from YouTube and launch videos selected by the user. To play the video, I’m using an intent:

Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse(videoAddress);

In order to call the YouTube app, if installed on the device.

The problem I’m having is that, of the population of videos I am using in my app, about 90% of them display a ‘Cannot play video’ error message: “Sorry, this video cannot be played.”. A few of them work just fine from my app. The videos that do not work will play fine in the YouTube app if searched for and launched entirely from within the YouTube app.

Has anybody seen this behavior, or does anybody have any ideas for things to try? Obviously the YouTube app launches videos in a slightly different way internally than it does from an Intent request, but I haven’t a clue how to get to the bottom of it.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I have the same issue. Are you sure that all of the video play correctly from the youtube app? In my case, on an old G1, the videos I can’t play from my app won’t play even if searched from within the youtube app.
    I think the video encoding is not supported in some case and/or the combination of a slow cpu and slow network make the video not playable.
    I’ve read about people just refreshing many times untill the video starts playing… I guess in thier care it was a network/buffering issue.
    More discussion here:
    http://www.google.com.tw/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=3a62cdf7188384af&hl=en

    For this reason my App (similar to yours) got a lot of bed comments. I republished it only for Android >=2.1 and I now I have fewer bad feedback.

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