Playback restricted on iOS for VEVO videos from Yo

Question

I have embedded videos (pulled from YouTube API v3) into my iPhone app using a UIWebView as suggested. The problem is that some videos, such as those from VEVO, produce the following error when attempting to play them on the device.

This video contains content from VEVO. It is restricted from playback on certain sites.

This should not occur, since apps like Flipboard and Rockpack also seem to be using a UIWebView, and are able to play videos from VEVO and other sources.

What could I be doing wrong?

PS: I am aware that there exist other posts that touch upon this issue in some way, but they fail to address this specific problem.

Answer 1

Are you getting the error on all videos from VEVO? Are you sure the video you're trying to play is embeddable? Add the 'videoEmbeddable' parameter with the 'true' value so you're only working with videos you can embed.

The videoEmbeddable parameter lets you to restrict a search to only videos that can be embedded into a webpage. If you specify a value for this parameter, you must also set the type parameter's value to video.

Acceptable values are: any – Return all videos, embeddable or not. true – Only retrieve embeddable videos.

source: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list#videoEmbeddable

Answer 2

Using YouTube's YTPlayerView for iOS and setting the origin property to a valid URL allows many VEVO videos to be played properly.

In your View Controller:

@property (weak, nonatomic) IBOutlet YTPlayerView *playerView;

// ..

NSDictionary *playerVars = @{
                             @"playsinline" : @1,
                             @"showinfo" : @0,
                             @"rel" : @0,
                             @"controls" : @1,
                             @"origin" : @"https://www.example.com", // this is critical
                             @"modestbranding" : @1
                             };

[self.playerView loadWithVideoId:@"Ri7-vnrJD3k" playerVars:playerVars];

With origin:

Without origin: