[Gnash-dev] youtube cookie bug

[Rob Savoye]

I've been looking into the problem with YouTube Cookies and the "an
error occurred" message. The offending field appears to be
"VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE". This also caused problems with Opera and Adobe
flash, which then had to release updates for it. If I delete this one
field from the cookie, the video plays. As it works when the cookie is
written by the browser, but but fails after it's written, I assume the
problem is when the cookie is read.

The Google FAQ says this about VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE:

> We first compute the bandwidth of almost every YouTube video played
> by considering the amount of data sent to and acknowledged by the
> user's machine in a given time period. Small video responses are
> excluded as they can add noise to our bandwidth calculation. This
> bandwidth estimate of every video played is associated with a
> VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie and with the IP address that requested the
> video, but NOT with a YouTube user name.
> 
> For the daily speed number as shown in the YouTube speed page we
> average the bandwidth for all videos played from a given cookie and
> IP address across the course of the day. If a single laptop user uses
> multiple network connections and watches videos regularly from these,
> they could see different speed measurements and historical data based
> on which connection they are using.
> 
> The measurements for geographical regions are computed by averaging
> the daily averages of all users (based on VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE cookie)
> who played videos in the same geographical region. The measurements
> for the Internet Service Provider (ISP) are got by averaging the
> daily averages of all users (again based on VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
> cookie) who use the same ISP and are in the same geographic region.

  I've got code in a branch that can read the cookies for youtube, but
setting them currently doesn't stay persistent. Does anyone have more of
a clue than I do about Cookies ? It seems to me that this should be
handled purely in the plugin, and not in Gnash itself.

        - rob -