You’ve likely run into the regretfully annoying screen on YouTube that states that whatever video you were trying to watch has been blocked. It may be due to various reasons, ranging from age or geographical restrictions to copyright claims and channel removals. Nevertheless, blocked YouTube videos can be a real pain.
Yet, as long as the YouTube video isn’t removed, such as by some of the aforementioned events, you can still watch it. Geo-restricted videos, for example, can be bypassed with numerous easy to access tools. We’ll be going over some of the best options and outline a complete tutorial of our favorite one.
4 Ways to Watch Blocked YouTube Videos
Use a proxy server
Proxies are among the cheapest and most reliable ways to watch blocked YouTube videos. They take a bit of tinkering to get used to, but once you’re done once, it’s not going to be that hard to use them.
They unblock YouTube by simply changing your IP address. Most of the avoidable video content blocks are, in one way or another, related to your IP address. Even geographical restrictions are based on it as they are used to guess where the device is connecting from.
On a surface level, a proxy server is just other machines. There’s two primary types of them (datacenter and residential). The former are proxies that are created in powerful business-owned servers. They get their IP address through the server and many of them can be created in one machine.
A residential proxy server, however, is created on the devices of regular internet users. They have an IP address assigned to them through an ISP. In most cases, they are significantly better for YouTube than datacenter ones as they are harder to detect. In fact, there are even dedicated YouTube proxies for those looking to squeeze out every bit of efficiency.
The only real drawback for proxies is that they aren’t all that user friendly. While great strides have been made in making them more accessible to everyday users, they still require slightly more complicated setup processes than the other options. On the other hand, they have little impact on performance, which can be quite important if you want to watch YouTube videos.
Use Tor
Tor is a popular privacy and internet security tool. The usual package includes two pieces - the Tor application itself and the associated browser. Once installed, the user can simply run Tor Browser to get all of the features in it.
One of the things Tor Browser does is change the perceived location of your machine due to the way the system works. Tor provides anonymity through volunteer nodes, which are basically regular user devices scattered across the world. Your dedicated browser then connects to a select few of them, granting you a new “identity”.
As such, blocked YouTube videos can be made accessible through Tor because it completely changes your location, IP address, etc. All websites will think it’s a completely different person connecting to them, making it a viable way to unblock YouTube.
Unfortunately, Tor is incredibly slow. While the speeds have been improving over the years, it would still be highly annoying to watch blocked videos through it. It’s just not that suited for watching a YouTube video. Tor is privacy first, performance later.
Use a VPN
A virtual private network or VPN is nearly identical to a proxy server in many regards. You get a dedicated IP address, you connect to some distant machine, and it routes traffic through the selected server.
They are, however, a lot more user friendly than proxies. While proxy providers will generally just give you a list of IP addresses, ports, and authentication details, VPNs have full-blown user interfaces. All it takes to connect to a virtual private network is installation, a few clicks, and you’re ready to watch YouTube videos.
Unfortunately, ease-of-use comes with some drawbacks. Since VPNs are so popular, many websites, including YouTube, know their IP addresses and may sometimes opt to block them entirely.
Additionally, VPNs route all traffic coming out of your machine instead of only the one used for YouTube. So, if you want to multitask with several internet-based activities, all of them will be significantly slowed down by the VPN. And slowed down they will be!
One of the most important drawbacks is that VPN servers are usually shared by many users, which means you’re not getting optimal speeds. Loading times on YouTube videos can be unbearably slow. Proxies, on the other hand, are often dedicated, which means you’re the only one using them at one moment in time.
Download blocked YouTube videos
Another way to bypass YouTube regional filter restrictions is to use downloading services. There’s an abundance of both free and paid tools (including their own YouTube Premium) that will allow you to download videos.
Outside of YouTube Premium, all the other tools will have one simple requirement - a video URL. As long as you have the video URL, they will be able to get you the content you want to watch. In most cases, you’ll be able to access videos blocked in your country with a little copying and pasting.
While getting a video URL isn’t hard, storing all the videos and watching them locally can be a bit irritating. Additionally, the free tools usually have tons of advertisements peppered throughout the page. Getting through them just to watch a YouTube video can be a real bore.
Finally, in most cases, we want to get a YouTube video on demand, without having to download it, run it, and then delete it. That’s why we think that using proxies to watch YouTube videos is the best option out of the four listed here.
How to unblock YouTube using proxies
1)Get the Metrow proxy manager extension
You can use our dedicated proxy manager extension for the simplest way to integrate proxies. It is currently available for Google Chrome.
In order to get started, simply click on “Add to Chrome”. Our extension will get installed and should become visible to the right of the URL bar. If not, click on the puzzle piece to open it up.
2) Get Metrow proxies
Now you’ll need to get some proxies. Simply go to our YouTube proxies page, click on the big button, fill out all the details and wait a little bit. We’ll get back to you with everything you need to continue your steps.
Once everything has cleared, you will get all the connection details, such as the username and password delivered to your email.
3) Create a profile in Metrow manager
Click on the extension button to get started. Then, select “Add new profile”.
You will then be greeted with a new screen. Change “mtr_username” to the username provided in your email. Additionally, change “password” to the password provided in the same letter. Finally, select the proxy rotation time and press “Add new”.
4) Turn on the proxy
You’re almost done! All you need to do is press the “Play” button to start using the proxy server and watch YouTube videos that are blocked in your country. You’ll be greeted with a big green “Connected”, so you’ll know if you’ve done everything correctly.
If your selected YouTube videos still fail to play, try resetting the profile. Additionally, you can select a short rotation time, such as 1 minute. That way, if the YouTube videos are still blocked, all you’ll need to do is wait for one minute before the IP (and the location) automatically changes.
Conclusion
While we haven’t exhausted all of the ways to watch a blocked YouTube video, proxies are certainly one of the best routes. They don’t take a long time to get set up, you get a ton of IP addresses that can unblock YouTube, and once you get the hang of it, they’re pretty simple to use. You even get much better speeds than a VPN or any other solution can provide.
