Note: The YouTube Data API (v2) has been officially deprecated as of March 4, 2014. Please refer to our deprecation policy for more information.

An uploaded video will immediately be visible in an authenticated user's uploaded videos feed. However, the video will not be visible on YouTube until it has been processed and indexed. The length of time between when the video is uploaded and when the video is publicly visible on YouTube varies. However, videos are usually indexed within one day and may be indexed in several hours or even less than an hour.

The following list explains two ways to check the status of an uploaded video:

• You can check the status of a user's unpublished videos by retrieving the user's uploaded videos feed. Entries in that feed that have not been published will contain the <app:control> tag. Please note that unpublished videos include videos that are still being processed, that failed to upload or that were rejected after being uploaded.

• If you upload a video using the direct upload method, then the Upload API response will contain a <link> tag for which the value of the rel attribute is self. To check the status of the uploaded video, send a GET request to the URL identified in this <link> tag.

  <link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml'
      href='https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/default/uploads/Video_ID'/>

When you check the status of an uploaded video, the status information will be contained in the <app:control> tag and its subtags, <app:draft> and <yt:state>. The following XML excerpt shows how these tags appear in an entry in an API response:

<entry gd:etag='W/"Ak4ER347eCp7ImA9WxRRF0k."'>
  <id>tag:youtube,2008:video:b5bbb2beb5a7d9ca</id>
  <app:control>
    <app:draft>yes</app:draft>
    <yt:state name='rejected' 
        reasonCode='tooLong'
        helpUrl='http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines'>
        Video is too long.
    </yt:state>
  </app:control>
  <yt:private/>
</entry>

Note: We recommend that you check the value of the <yt:state> tag and communicate to video owners whether an unpublished video is still being processed or if an error caused the upload to fail or be rejected. The Java, .NET, PHP and Python developer's guides all provide some sample code for checking the values of these tags.

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