YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: uploads

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

Video Uploads from Your Site’s Community

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Update (August 2012): We now suggest YouTube Direct Lite rather than YouTube Direct for most new integrations.
The following scenario comes up all the time when we talk to developers: a website with an active readership is interested in soliciting videos from its community. While YouTube is a great place to host these videos, it takes some forethought to design a system that makes uploading as straightforward as possible while still adhering to YouTube API Terms of Service and best practices.

One crucial consideration is which account the videos will be uploaded to on YouTube. It’s tempting to design a system in which all videos are uploaded to a single “master” YouTube account, but this is always the wrong approach. While using a master account means that each uploader doesn’t need to register for their own YouTube account, a high rate of uploads into a single YouTube account is a good way to run afoul of the YouTube API’s quota system. Additionally, each uploader to YouTube agrees to YouTube’s Terms of Service, which says that they have the right to upload that content, and that the content does not violate our Community Guidelines. By taking responsibility for other users’ content, you are essentially putting your own account and YouTube standing at risk.

The approach we recommend instead is using AuthSub or OAuth 2 (please don’t use ClientLogin!) to authenticate users and allow users to access their YouTube accounts. Then, you can use the browser-based upload flow to transmit the video from users’ local drives to YouTube’s servers. Uploads spread across end users’ accounts are less likely to trigger quota errors. And since videos end up in individual accounts, each account owner takes responsibility for ensuring that their uploads comply with YouTube’s community guidelines. Videos uploaded via your site will show up in a user’s channel just like any of their other videos.

After a video’s been uploaded, you will almost certainly want to display it on your own site or on a YouTube channel page, which raises the question of how to keep track of videos that have been uploaded through your site but which end up in users’ own accounts. One option for doing this programmatically is via the use of developer tags; another approach is to make use of a local database and keep track of the YouTube video id returned by the API following each upload. Once you’ve identified uploaded videos that you’d like to feature, you could, for instance, add them to a playlist and embed that playlist on your site, or feature the playlist on the channel page of your own YouTube account.

Designing a system that adheres to these best practices takes a little work, but avoiding the common pitfalls will pay off in the long run. For existing code that you could use as-is or adapt on your own site, take a look at the YouTube Direct project. It consists of code that uses AuthSub, browser-based uploads, developer tags, and playlists to allow the users of any website to contribute video uploads.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Google

Labels: authentication , best practices , uploads , youtube direct

YouTube API @ Google I/O 2010

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Kuan Yong, Gareth McSorley and I -- representing Product Management, Engineering, and Developer Relations, respectively -- were happy to present a YouTube API session at this year’s Google I/O developer conference. We got the chance to meet many members of the developer community there, but unfortunately not everyone is able to make it out to San Francisco in person. For the benefit of those who could not attend, a recording of our session is now available on YouTube, and embedded below.

The session was titled “YouTube API Uploads: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices” and we covered all topics related to uploads from A (Android app uploads) to Z (zero-metadata uploads). We hit a few letters in between, too: B (browser-based uploads) I (iPhone app uploads), Q (upload quota questions), R (resumable uploads) and Y (YouTube Direct). There’s something for everyone in this session, so if your application uploads video to YouTube, be sure to check it out!

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team
YouTube is hiring! ~ http://google.com/jobs/workyoutube

Google

Labels: googleio , metadata , resumable , uploads , youtube direct

Enrich your site with YouTube Direct

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Today we announced the launch of YouTube Direct, a new tool built on top of YouTube's public APIs that enables any developer to solicit video submissions on their website, powered by YouTube.

Users upload their videos directly on the developer's website, after which the developer can review the submissions and select the best ones to showcase. Since these videos live on YouTube, users are able to reach YouTube's large user base directly while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create.

Although YouTube Direct was originally created with our news partners in mind, we believe that other developers and website owners can benefit from it as well. To put YouTube Direct in the hands of as many developers as possible, we open sourced the bulk of the code and designed it to run on Google App Engine - Google's scalable hosting platform. This enables developers to easily deploy their own instance of the tool and take advantage of App Engine's scalability and low cost. The videos themselves are served from the same infrastructure that powers YouTube.com.

Visit YouTube Direct for Developers page to read more about it or go directly to the project page to download the code. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on this new tool. Drop us a line in YouTube's Developer Forum.

Google

Labels: direct , embed , uploads

Direct Uploads Server Migration

Monday, October 12, 2009

We first announced our new API upload infrastructure back in June and asked developers to test their YouTube API code against our staging environment.

Since then, we've started deploying the new upload infrastructure to production machines in a phased manner. Last month, we transitioned browser-based API uploads to the new servers, and have been closely monitoring performance and error rates to ensure that there were no unintended side effects.

We're now ready to begin the transition for direct uploads. Starting today, a small percentage of direct uploads traffic will automatically be routed to our new servers. We will be monitoring traffic over the next few weeks and gradually increasing the traffic that the new servers receive until we have fully completed the migration.

As a developer, you won't have to make any changes in your code to take advantage of the increased reliability and bug fixes found in the new infrastructure. While we do expect that this new infrastructure will be fully backwards compatible, if you do notice any change in your application's behavior with regard to direct uploads, please let us know in our developer group.