Adventure Lab audio file does not play

[+P@je]

I created and published an Adventure Lab including an audio file via You tube (publically available - so not 'private' !). However some smartphones can play the audio file and some can not. I refer to Android devices as I have no experience with Iphones. Any suggestions/ideas ?

[Keystone]

I moved this thread from the Geocaching Android App forum.

[+Tungstène]

What do you mean by "some can not"? Is there some kind of error message, is the player not appearing or something else? (I hope you already checked the device's audio volume).

[+JoyChang]

I've same issue here, some android phones could play the YouTube video and some couldn't (like mine).
It shows a broken file icon when I tried to play the video on my phone.
But then I tried to update the YouTube app to the newest version, it works for me now.

[+Fugads]

I am having this problem as well as I work on creating my Adventure Lab. I am linking to popular music videos at different stages of my AL, but wen i run a test, I get a message "Video Unavailable". I suspect this has something to do with Copyright material, but am not sure. Any help or insight people have on this issue would be appreciated. My AL is still in test mode.

[+JoyChang]

Have you check if the video is public or not? Private videos will not be available to play.

 

Or,  you may check if you paste the correct URL, it'll be like this: "https://youtu.be/_video's_code_here" 

[+Fugads]

Yes, I've checked that videos are public. For my Lab, I am referencing popular or semi-popular songs. for example, one stage is near a slide and I post a link to a song called Slide by the Goo Goo Dolls :

https://youtu.be/yP4qdefD2To

The video is public, posted by what appears to be the band itself, and yet when I use this link in my Adventure Lab, I get a "Video Unavailable" message. What strikes me as odd is that while in the Adventure Lab App, where it says video unavailable, the youtube player embedded in the app has links to other videos by the same band, and those play fine. What's even more funny is that if I use the URL for one of those other videos in my adventure lab, that video won't play either (same message of Video Unavailable). Something is weird here with the software, and it is frustrating me quite a bit. I'm hoping to figure it out though. Any help or advice people have is welcome.

[+CaseysPeeps]

We are experiencing the same problem when we put a link to a youtube video in our Adventure Lab cache. Any solutions yet??

[+Fugads]

Checking back in on this to see if there has been any other experiences. I really hope someone comes up with a solution to this. I contacted HQ Support and got a very generic response:

Quote

Sorry to hear you are having trouble with YouTube videos. During this experimental phase of the Adventure Lab platform, our goal is to see how Adventure creators and players want to use the app, and to build towards those goals. At this stage, the only way we support videos is by using the instructions from page 4 of the builder guide, which instruct; 

 

• Use the URL from YouTube, for example: https://youtu.be/vuFiLhhCNww.

• Be sure the video is either public or unlisted on YouTube.

• Private videos will not play. (I am unsure about the music rights rules of YouTube as a service). 

We look forward to seeing your Adventure go public for the world to play. 

 

I played around with a bunch of things, like publishing my own Youtube video containing the song I want a user to hear... even that gets the same message. I suspect it has something to do with Youtube's copyright algorithms. All the songs on Youtube are picked up by some kind of copyright algorithm so that you can't monetize using them without explicit permission. I don't really care about monetization, but I think this might be somehow related to the videos not playing in the Adventure Lab app. Just a guess though. I tried embedding a video I uploaded that had no music in it, and it plays just fine in the AL app.

 

I went ahead and made my AL public a week ago and put a note in the text field of each stage that reads:

Quote

If the embedded youtube video doesn't play for some reason, copy paste the link below into your phone's browser:

https://youtu.be/link####
 

Really clunky, and I bet most people playing the AL will not bother to watch the youtube links if they don't play in the App, but it was the best I could do. I've asked a few people who completed my AL already if they could see the embedded video and was told by both that they got an error message. One of them watched some of the links by copy-pasting the link, so that makes me happy. But still, I really wish the AL App would just play the darned embedded videos. Really disappointed that it seems to have problems with this.

[+J&LA]

We've done some testing on this and have come to the conclusion that this is indeed related to regional copyrights.

 

We are in the US.

 

1st We used links to US music groups with copyrights on them. These would not play in the AL, would show links to related vids that would play, but not link to those directly. These copyright limitations did NOT exist in the UK or Canada (would play fine there) but would not play in the US or Mexico.

 

2nd We used links to our own short clips from the same videos on our own channel (set to allow embedding and set to public or unlisted) with the exact same result as #1.

 

3rd We tried music from Russia and Italy that showed no copyright claims on YouTube, and those played fine everywhere we tried. We didn't check to see if they would play in their home country. 

 

4th We tried other videos with no copyright claims on them, same result as #3.

 

Hope this helps.