Google Video to have a stand-alone client?
People can be blinded by the buzz around the possibility of a Google PC. With this (quite interesting) information circulating, it is easy to ignore other products and services which makes it easier for Google to be stealthy in areas which they might not want attention drawn.
I decided to take my focus away from Google PC to learn more about Google Video which has been very active lately. I discovered something.
One of the first things I always do is look at the robots.txt file for the domain I am researching, in this case http://video.google.com/robots.txt. I wasn't expecting anything, but one entry in the file caught my attention: "Disallow: /downloadgvp".
I looked into the history of this robots.txt file using the Internet Archive, and found that this entry had not existed prior to April 1, 2005 -- meaning it had been appended some time after most of the entries were already created.
Armed with this information, and a new acronym in my vocabulary (gvp), I decided to let my digging skills loose on Google Video. After about 10 unsuccessful attempts at using my educated guessing skills to determine what gvp might do and how it might be accessed, I uncovered this link:
http://video.google.com/videogvp?docid=-688501305175209645
This link downloads a simple text file which you can open in notepad. The information within this file kept me on my path of discovery. Here is a sample of the contents based on the docid passed in.
# download the free Google Video Player from http://video.google.com/
gvp_version:1.1
url:http://vp.video.google.com/videoplayback?id=
f98cefa93c3d3d67&begin=0&
len=97399&itag=9&urlcreated=1136390520&docid=
-688501305175209645&
urlcreated=1136390520&sigh=
VeRNWb1rZEPaaM0pHpfAJkltLp8
docid:-688501305175209645
duration:97399
title:Rickson Gracie fights Hugo Duarte
description:Rickson Gracie, arguably the
best grappler ever, fights
Hugo Duarte on the beach in Rio.
description:
description:Trivia: Royce Gracie, three times UFC champion,
can be spotted in the crowd.
description:
description:Uploaded by Inge T
Google Video Player? Isn't that what they originally called the plugin that allowed users to watch videos on Google Video? Not exactly. Look at their patch file for VLC which can be found on this page, you can see that Google calls this product "Google Video Viewer."
-!define PRODUCT_NAME "VLC media player"
+!define VERSION "1.0"
+!define PRODUCT_NAME "Google Video Viewer"
That settled, I decided to follow the URL that we find in the downloaded text file. To my surprise, it actually downloads the video in question. Unfortunately it doesn't quite play in my Windows Media Player, but I did manage to view the file through VLC.
So that brings me back to the patch file. It clearly says that it is version "1.0", but if we look back to the text file that we found, a reference to version "1.1" is made. Is Google getting ready to release a modified version of VLC media player that will be capable of handling these "pay-per-view videos"? I have requested a comment from Google, but have yet to receive any response regarding this issue.