Proxy Server or Jailbroken Phone?

Through feedback through some of our loyal users, we’ve gotten some information that we wanted to share regarding using our apps on Jailbroken Phones and/or through network connections that use proxy servers:

Proxy Servers: A couple of users have reported that when they are using our app via a connection that utilizes a proxy server that they can see the listings of videos, but none of the videos will play. According to these users, when they select a video – the image in the top of the detail view that normally shows the play icon instead shows a “unavailable” icon similar to what we have discussed before in this blog. This is due to a limitation on the YouTube player within the phone itself and is not a result of something in our application. You would also find that if you went to the built in YouTube app, you’d see the same result. Please make sure your connection is not utilizing a proxy server otherwise you may not be able to play videos on the phone.

Some public wifi hotspots automatically use proxy servers – places such as restaurants, hotels, and many public wifi hot spots in a work environment. It is also not uncommon to use a proxy server specifically to prohibit access to a site such as YouTube. For this reason, please make sure your connection is free of proxy servers and the built-in YouTube app will play videos normally prior to contacting us for support when video playback fails.

Jailbroken Phones: Of course, many people out there are using Jailbroken phones – this is no secret. As most people know, these phones can usually not only download apps from the App Store, but also from third party sources. Just the process of jailbreaking a phone introduces issues with YouTube and other built in features of the phone. We cannot possibly support all of the potential configurations of jailbroken phones, so we recommend that if you have a jailbroken phone, and you experience trouble using our app, you investigate all potential third party add-ons you have installed to your phone prior to contacting us. We also ask that you disclose that your phone is jailbroken when you contact us. As for our app, we know it’s stable and works 100% of the time on a standard iPhone or iPod Touch. If you are experiencing troubles using the phone’s built-in YouTube player, our app will not function. We use the very same player that is built into the phone – so please do not contact us if the native YouTube player on your phone will not play.

There are also many other “third party” plugins that cause issues on jailbroken phones and are also unsupported. Safari Download Manager, and Safari Download Plugin are two such apps that cause issues with pretty much any form of streamed or downloaded media. We never endorse jailbreaking your phone, and this is especially true if you are a casual user without much knowledge of how the iPhone actually works. Additionally, we do not have access to a jailbroken phone for testing, so please keep this in mind prior to contacting us for help through our support e-mail address.

We can try to help as much as possible – but the two items listed above (Proxy Servers and Jailbroken phones) so far represent the cause of issues that have been reported to us. Thanks for reading!

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