Report (Objectives)

Introduction
ViiKii is a wesbite where users visit to watch subtitled dramas. (http://www.viikii.net/)

Viikii sources their dramas and videos from Youtube. They do not host any videos on their own website.

The ViiKii users would then add the subtitles to the dramas using a certain ViiKii tool available on their website.

These subtitles that they add are soft, meaning that the subtitles are not added directly on the video itself. The subtitles itself is a separate file from the video.

That means should one look up the original video on Youtube itself, the ViiKii user added subs will not appear.

However, there are times when Youtube would restrict access to Viikii users since the videos are Youtube sourced.

The error prompted to users mean that Youtube is rejecting connections from the ViiKii server because too many users on ViiKii are trying to watching the same video during the same period of time. This is a possible problem since ViiKii does have a high volume of traffic to their website, at more than 60 thousand visitors for the whole of February.

So this results in a problem for ViiKii users who want to watch their favourite foreign dramas in their preferred language.

ViiKii has a open source element to it in the sense that any of their users can edit the subtitles on the videos freely, modify them or build open them. Anyone can edit the subtitles and everyone can watch the videos there for free. Hence we want to make it easier for ViiKii to be accessed since its subtitling service is free and is open source element in a sense.

Disclaimer

Before going into the objectives of our project, we would like to add a disclaimer here, stating that we are indeed aware of the copyright infringement issues involved in posting videos of dramas on Youtube.

However, the main focus of our project is not dealing with the copyright infringement issue, hence the problem is assumed to be non-existing.

Objectives

With that disclaimer in mind, lets move on to the objectives of our project.

The first objective of our project, was then to find out why exactly is Youtube limiting access to ViiKii’s servers? Which is causing many ViiKii users to get furious as they are unable to watch their subtitled videos.

At first, we suspected that the problem of restricted access to ViiKii’s server is due to Youtube’s limited cloud computing capacity.

And that by simply increasing Youtube’s cloud computing capacity, this problem can be solved.

Hence one of our project’s objectives to discover if this solution is viable and appropriate in this situation.

But we are also aware that the cloud computing capacity issue might not be the real cause of the limited access problem. Hence, in our project, we aim to find what is the true cause of the real problem. Our findings will be explained later on.

The Viikii plug in is a temporary solution to the problem of restricted access. http://blog.viikii.net/viikii-desktop-plugin/

The plug in has to installed onto the computer. It allows ViiKii users to bypass the problem of restricted access and allows them to watch the videos on ViiKii without Youtube restricting them.

ViiKii does not offer an explanation on their website as to how their plug in works. Hence, our objective is to find out by ourselves, how the ViiKii plug in actually works to prevent Youtube from restricting access and users can watch the subtitled videos.

-Sharlene