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YouTube Video Accessibility & Cloud Computing Capacity by Ngo Dieu Thuy Trang, Sharlene Goh, Sandra Ganapragasam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Singapore License.

Report (Conclusion, Next Stage)

Conclusion

We conclude that Youtube could perhaps be limiting access to its videos that are hosted on external platforms, such as Viikii, so as to reduce the problem of spambots.

A spambot is an automated computer program, or, more rarely, a script, designed to assist in the sending of spam. On Youtube, certain users may use spambots to increase the view count of their videos, to increase video ratings or to increase comments.

However, on Viikii, viewers are only able to view the Youtube videos and are not able to rate or comment on the videos. But, the Youtube server could be mistaking them for spambots and limits video access to them. Hence, users accessing Youtube videos via Viikii are unable to watch them.

Suggestions

Our group has come up with two suggestions to help solve the problem. The first of which is through the usage of verification codes and the other, more feasible suggestion, is to for Youtube and Viikii to form a partnership.

1. Verification Codes
   If the issue of spambots is the root of the problem, then perhaps verification codes could be activated on the Viikii sites just like in Youtube. This would allow users to access the videos since they are able to prove that they are human.
   
   However, there are some problems with this suggestion. It will be quite troublesome because Viikii viewers can still access the videos directly on Youtube, just that there will not any subtitling. Moreover, Youtube may not be too keen on enabling verification codes on an external platform, such as Viikii.
   
   

2. Partnership
   The alternative suggestion, which we believe to be superior and more viable, is the forming of a partnership between Youtube and Viikii. With this partnership, Youtube can still host the videos on its own platform while Viikii can provide the subtitling service. Thus, viewers can then access the videos on Youtube with subtitles by enabling Closed Captions feature.
   
   Closed Captions is a Youtube feature that is still in its Beta stage. What it does is that it transcribes audio that is in English and then translates it to various other languages. But the service is not very accurate and even hilarious at times. Closed captions works best when the speaker has very clear diction and does not use slang or colloquialism.
   
   At this moment in time, Closed Captions is not able to transcribe audio in any other language other than English. Thus, Viikii still has an advantage since most of the dramas on Viikii are in Mandarin, Korean and Japanese and Closed Captions cannot transcribe and translate from these languages.
   
   However, if Closed Captions improves to include such capabilities, Viikii’s usefulness will certainly come under threat. Therefore, one way to ensure Viikii’s survival is to propose that Youtube use the Closed Captions feature to transcribe audio in other languages other than English and then Viikii can assist Youtube with both the transcribing of the audio, as well as translation.
   
   A possible problem of the partnership is the issue of revenue. Youtube relies on advertising revenue to make profits whereas Viikii is solely dependent on donations from its site. If a partnership is formed, they will have to decide who gets which share of the revenue.

Next Stage

In the next stage, we would firstly have to propose the idea of a partnership to both Youtube and Viikii. Moreover, we want to suggest to Viikii to copyright their subtitles through Creative Commons so that when a partnership with Youtube is formed, other subtitling websites will not be able to ‘steal’ their subtitles without their permission.

Our project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Singapore License.

License

YouTube Video Accessibility & Cloud Computing Capacity by Ngo Dieu Thuy Trang, Sharlene Goh, Sandra Ganapragasam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Singapore License.

Report (What has been done and Why)

Part A: Finding out the cause

1. As YouTube has come under Google's ownership recently, we emailed Google Team to ask why they restrict access to certain videos as explained in the introduction. Unfortunately, due to restriction on confidential information disclosure, Google declined to reveal any information to us.

2. We next carried out an experiment as follows:

• Accessed a video on ViiKii on 6 March 2010, after it was released on 4 March 2010 from http://mysoju.com, a free platform that provides links to videos streamed elsewhere.
• The restricted access problem arose.
  
• However, the same video, without subtitles from ViiKii, was still accessible from YouTube itself. This has an important implication that YouTube is still able to cater for additional requests, but just that it denied simultaneous requests from one source (i.e. ViiKii server for example)
  
• After activating ViiKii plug-in, the video with subtitles played smoothly on Mysoju.

3. YouTube forum suggested to us that this is more a problem of spambots. Normally, YouTube will require users to verify themselves as human if it suspects that the many requests sent from a particular user are actually from a spamming program. A verification code is expected to be entered to complete the procedure. When watching the video from a third-party site, no verification is available for the users to verify themselves, and hence being denied access.

Conclusion: Capacity of cloud computing infrastructure is not the cause, but spambot concern is.

Part B: Investigating the existing solutions

1. ViiKii Plug-in - A temporary solution
As demonstrated, using the ViiKii plug-in can alleviate the problem. However, not all users have successfully deployed the tool. The plug-in also needs frequent upgrade to match YouTube's streaming method.

Again, we faced the problem with obtaining information directly from related party, ViiKii, so we have made certain guesses on how this plug-in works to see what problem it really solves.

Using http://whatismyipaddress.com, we check our IP address before and after activating the ViiKii plug-in. The result obtained was that our IP address did not change throughout the experiment. However, it is possible that the IP address can be changed externally before reaching the YouTube server. Hence, the plug-in may work on the principle of re-routing network and assigning a different address for each user when contacting the YouTube server.


2. Closed Caption Feature (Beta) - A technology in infancy
A potential rival to what ViiKii's service is YouTube's Closed Caption feature. This is an automatic transcribing and translating function that will allow users to use on CC-enabled videos to watch them in their native language. This feature uses Google's Voice Recognition Technology.

Still in its Beta phase, YouTube's CC can only work with videos in English and of high audio quality. As a result, it is not a direct competitor to ViiKii, as the latter mainly provides subtitles to drama series in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.

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

1. Problem - General knowlege

(This part may not be included in the final paper.)

ViiKii

Source: http://canarytrap.net/tag/fansubbing/
ViiKii.net is a collaborative translation and subtitling platform for streaming video that distributes that tasks of translating television shows and other media from around the world across an entire community of users.
The way Viikii.net works is that people can register for the site and contribute to subtitling uploaded video files in over 200 languages, line by line. Currently you can publish any video that is already on YouTube. (Link)Users can also edit and revise each other’s translations, refine the timing of the subtitles, or upload new files and put in requests for translations.

Source: http://www.viikii.net/inboxes/listing/mithrakrishprem/1
The subs on Viikii are "soft subs" meaning the subtitles are not attached to the video - so the video is coming from one source such as YouTube or Myspace or the original broadcaster's website and the subtitles are coming from the Viikii server so you can't download subtitles with the video.

Soft subs

Source: http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/viewtopic_59952.htm
Soft subs are subtitles that are distributed SEPARATE from the video file. They come as a text file, using extensions like .SUB, .SRT, etc. The reason for the different extensions is that there are different formats used for soft subs.
The purpose of soft subs is so that a single video file (referred to as the RAW file) can be distributed all over the world. Then the viewer can pick & choose which language he would like to view the subtitles in. With the correct media player or an auxiliary program, softsubs are superimposed on the footage and appear indistinguishable from hardsubs. (Link) Hard subs are subtitles that are rendered into the video itself.

Schedule (constantly updated)

-Recess week Mar 1-7: emailed Google and ViiKii teams for related questions

1. http://www.google.com/support/forum/user?hl=en&userid=16673645549147131133
3/6/10

"I can play newly released drama with subtitles from ViiKii with the ViiKii plug-in. It is not possible otherwise during the first few days, with the reason given as "Because of many simultaneous requests, YouTube is temporarily limiting access now". Raw videos can still be played from YouTube with no subtitles.

Why is YouTube limiting requests from ViiKii?"

2. http://blog.viikii.net/#comment-1602
March 6, 2010 at 7:20 am

"I am doing a project on Cloud computing with the application for YouTube. I can see that there is sometimes access problems with YouTube-sourced. However, I have installed the ViiKii plug-in and get away with it.

I would like to know more about how the plug-in actually solves the problem and how stable it is from your experience if possible."

-Fri 12 Mar 2010: seek help from Mr. Harish if Google has not answered.
-Tue 23 Mar 2010: pending for Google's answer, most likely have to make some guesses on the case
-Tue 30 Mar 2010: group meeting to finalize what to write in the report
-Tue 6 Apr 2010: presentation (10') by each member + Q&A (5'). Report to be submitted by sending link to Mr. Harish.