How to grant access to youtube.com ?

Question

Hi everyone,

we would like to allow our employees to watch youtube videos and we work with the category based fortigate webfilter system (Fortigate 1000C). The category "bandwidth consuming" is generally blocked. Youtube.com belongs to this category, which is not a problem at all, because I am able to overwrite this category for single domains. So I allready made an overwrite entry for the domains youtube.com, youtube.de, youtu.be and put them into the category "entertainment", which is generally allowed. Accessing youtube.com is now possible for the users, but the videos do not start to play. I guess that the videos will be loaded from another url wihtin the "bandwidth consuming" category, but I cannot find any information about where exactly. When I allow this category for testing, then youtube works fine. But the CIO do not want to allow this category in general. Does anybody know anything about the youtube video urls or has any hint to find more information?

Getting support from youtube is literaly impossible.

Thanks a lot.

packetpusher · Accepted Answer

Select a browser, i.e. Google Chrome. Go to the YouTube's main page. Right click anywhere on the page and select "Inspect" from the context menu. From left to right (focus on the top right of the page) select the "Network" tab. Then down below check the "Names" column. Start a video streaming. If the site corresponding to the video is listed in red color then it is filtered/blocked by a web category enabled on your firewall. Hover over the site to get the URL (copy/paste) and place it in the URL exclusion list of your currently in use web profile. That should do it

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Qubit · Answer

Hi Lorac, I'm not expert at all and am still learning as well, but what I found out is youtube videos run from videos.google.com or similar so you need to make an overwrite/exception for that as well.

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