YouTube is probably the best place to find good video content. However, nowadays, due to copyright issues and legal troubles, you might find some YouTube videos to be age-restricted and blocked for some countries. Hence, it becomes an inconvience at times when you don’t want to sign in or if a video is not available in your country.
Now, you want a solid solution that helps you to watch restricted videos without signing in and bypass geo-location restrictions. In this article, we shall discuss the best way (or sites) that you would want to utilize to unblock YouTube videos easily.
1. Connecting Through A VPN
VPN Illustration | Credits: ExpressVPN
If you want to access a YouTube video that is restricted to a specific country, VPN is your best friend. You just have to select the correct server location (country/region). If you don’t know, just try changing the server locations till you find the correct one. A VPN is the ultimate solution to bypass any geo restrictions set by the uploader of YouTube.
My personal favorites for the job would be: ExpressVPN & VyprVPN. In either case, you can utilize Opera’s in-built free VPN to have unrestricted access to the desired video(s). Fret not, you can utilize any of the VPN services available (or have subscribed to).
2. Utilizing a Proxy
Generally, you need to have a subscription for a VPN. In addition to that, a VPN is more secure than a proxy service. However, if you do not want to spend a penny to watch unrestricted videos on YouTube, there are tons of free proxy services available.
HideMyAss’s proxy service is quite popular when it comes to something like this. You get a couple of server locations to choose from and have the ability to encrypt the URL, disable the cookies, and remove scripts – if needed.Do note that proxy services are browser-based – so if you want a system-wide solution with more security, we recommend using a VPN.
3. Use A Trick To Unblock Age-Restricted Videos
You can easily watch a ton of videos on YouTube without signing in. However, some of the videos might ask you to sign in – to confirm your age. So, in that case, you can try a trick to bypass the warning and watch the video.
Here’s how to do that:
Focus on the URL of the video on the address bar. For example, it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O07u7KdRVo0
So, here, instead of “watch” – replace it with “watch_popup” and you are done. Now, the video will play in full screen mode bypassing age-restrictions.
4. Using TubeUnblock
Similar to the trick we used above – you just have to replace “youtube” from the URL with “tubeunblock“.
For instance, I want to watch a video with URL:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Eet4omeYcJY
Here, I need to simply replace one word, that gives me the final URL as:
https://tubeunblock.com/watch?v=Eet4omeYcJY
5. YouTube Video Downloaders
Unless you want to save the video – you do not really need to utilize an online YouTube downloader. But, as an alternative to all the solutions mentioned-above, this works pretty well too.
You just need the URL of the target video and paste it to one the online downloaders available. You can try OnlineVideConverter’s YouTube downloader or SaveFrom.net which we also mentioned in our guide to help you download YouTube videos on Android.
Do note that we do not promote downloading YouTube videos to re-use or re-upload them.
Wrapping Up
If you want unrestricted access to YouTube’s content – the best way is to sign in. But, if you do not want to sign in or notice a geo-restriction on any particular video, you can try all the solutions mentioned above. Nevertheless, your priority should be security and privacy while watching restricted YouTube videos. Hence, using a VPN would be the preferred choice.
In either case, a proxy or the unblocking trick should do the job. And, as a last resort – to download a blocked YouTube video; the online YouTube downloaders should come in handy.
Filed in . Read more about YouTube.