YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: v2

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Staging Server Now Defaults to YouTube API Version 2

Monday, September 13, 2010

The YouTube Google Data API currently exists in two flavors: version 1 and version 2. If you’re not explicitly requesting version 2 of the API, then you’re using the default, version 1.

As we add new functionality to the API, it’s invariably added to version 2: features like partial responses/updates, extended access controls, captioning support, and YouTube Insight statistics are only available to developers accessing the newer release. We’ve kept version 1 running as-is for a while now, and will continue to do so for months to come, but we’re taking the first step to transition developers off of version 1 of the API by changing the default in our staging server environment to version 2.

We expect to default the production environment to version 2 before the end of the year, and we will post again when we have more definite dates. In the meantime, if you are still using version 1 of the API, please prepare for the change by taking one of the following steps:

Modify a test version of your code to access stage.gdata.youtube.com URLs as described in this blog post. You’ll automatically default to version 2, and you can test and make changes to your code against the staging server.
Start explicitly requesting version 2 using the v=2 URL parameter or GData-Version HTTP request header. Most of the YouTube API client libraries provide methods for switching between API versions, and they will take care of setting the appropriate GData-Version header for you. You may need to modify your code to make it compatible with version 2.
If you know that your code is incompatible with version 2 of the YouTube API and you can’t fix things yet, start explicitly requesting version 1 of the API. Note that this is not a long-term solution, as all code will eventually need to be migrated off of version 1.

Stay tuned over the coming months for more announcements about the change to the default in production, and the eventual decommission of version 1, currently scheduled for October 2011.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team