One of our teachers is trying to show videos using Scratch. It works fine for her but not students. After further investigation it looks like Scratch uses player.vimeo.com as its video player. Our school blocks vimeo.com as it is categorized as having adult content (videos inappropriate for students). Is there any way to force Scratch to use a different player? Unblocking vimeo is not an option. Thank you.

No, because the videos are hosted on Vimeo. Of course, you could log in at home and upload them to youtube if you wanted…

This is a good question - does your school simply stop the player from running, or does it block any access to the player.vimeo.com site at all? If the former you could probably use some fancy AJAX requests to get the source of a video, and then run that through the native HTML5 <video> element, or even download the file, but it's more likely the latter is true. I'm not sure!

If you use Firefox or Chrome, you could get a VPN extension like Hola Unblocker to get around the block.

Sonickyle wrote:

If you use Firefox or Chrome, you could get a VPN extension like Hola Unblocker to get around the block.

Most schools with a blocking system block vpns, proxies, and unblockers too, understandably. Worth a shot if your school's page filter is terribly coded, though

Make a proxy server outside of the school network that streams Vimeo videos w/o anything else, like https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/youtube/videoid/ on Scratch but for Vimeo.
It may not need a proxy depending on your school.

We block anything that tries to access vimeo.com, and strongly discourage any students from attempting to get around our filtering (proxy, vpn, etc). the teachers can access the video, just not the students. This particular teacher can download the video and post it to youtube, but it's kind of a pain. Thanks everyone for the input!

Wait I think I know
Have a webserver running on your school network that serves a page displaying the video embedded on an HTML page the normal way,
but if you can, then you should set the school to allow connections to player.vimeo.com with a Referrer header that matches the computer with the webserver's IP address.
(If students know how and can use whatever software they like on the school computers, or even abuse software they are allowed to/should use at school, they could possibly forge a request to vimeo with a referrer header)

HI,
I am a teacher. My school blocks the Vimeo web site as it contains content unsuitable for children and does not have an educational only channel like You Tube.

There is no way I am going to encourage any form of bypassing our security.

My students cannot watch videos hosted on Vimeo.

Can the ptb not move the video tutorials on the Scratch site to a child friendly hosting service, such as the educational channel on You Tube?

This would be the correct way forward.

ICT_Teacher1 wrote:

HI,
I am a teacher. My school blocks the Vimeo web site as it contains content unsuitable for children and does not have an educational only channel like You Tube.

There is no way I am going to encourage any form of bypassing our security.

My students cannot watch videos hosted on Vimeo.

Can the ptb not move the video tutorials on the Scratch site to a child friendly hosting service, such as the educational channel on You Tube?

This would be the correct way forward.

The Educational channel?
Just host it locally on your servers, ask the students to go and watch 'em