The viewer was designed to only play videos from Google’s servers. That restriction didn’t last for long.
The Norwegian hacker known in the media as DVD Jon seems to have found a way to allow Google’s video viewer, a part of its Google Video search feature, to play videos from servers besides those owned by Google.
In his cheekily-named So Sue Me blog, Jon Lech Johansen released a patch that allows the video viewer to play VLC format files regardless of where they are hosted.
Google’s Video Viewer is a modified version of an open source project called VideoLAN Client. The player supports numerous multimedia file formats across a variety of operating system platforms, without requiring additional codecs.
The patch requires the system to have the .NET runtime on it. Google has recommended that people not run the patch, though.
“We strongly advise users not to download this modification,” Nathan Tyler, a Google spokesman, said. “It could result in security vulnerabilities in their computer and may disrupt their computer’s ability to access Google video.”
Unless the patch goes beyond tweaking the few lines of code that do limit the Google Video Viewer to playing files from Google servers, the only concern users of the patch should have would be if they trust the source of a video they wish to view.
And that concern applies to web sites and e-mail anyway, so many users will already understand this.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
