iPads and YouTube etc "This video is currently unavailable"

Just thought I'd post this in case anyone else encounters the problems we've been having with the playing of media content on iPads in school. This may affect other tablets too, but I haven't been able to test others.

Issue: Netbooks and computers can use YouTube, but iPads fail with a message "This video is currently unavailable". This can happen with some of the stranger formats uploaded onto YouTube, but this was across the board. There were very few pieces of content that would play and those that would play were very old.

There is a huge amount of discussion about this on the internet, much of it pointing the finger at either Apple of Google as the party at fault. One of the key things for us, though, is that this worked outside school - teachers could use YouTube at home, but not in the classroom. However, there was no issue with playing the same content on netbooks, laptops or desktop computers.

The problem was further compounded when iPads were not able to play sample material from iTunes - song clips, that kind of thing. This would simply not play, but again, worked fine outside school.

Resolution: The issue was finally resolved by changing a setting on the firewall to Allow Port Range Requests Through Unmodified.

Apparently both YouTube and iTunes on iPad request a port range rather than a port, and this gets blocked unless this setting is enabled. Having enabled it, all of these problems have pretty much evaporated. It's worth checking that your firewall allows port range requests if you're having these sorts of problems.

All the best,

Mike