YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: embed

The YouTube Player: Now with 30% More Playlistiness!

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

When we launched support for lists of videos in the YouTube player in March, it was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm. However, some developers pointed out that at first glance it didn’t look very much like a playlist. In particular, they wanted the list of video thumbnails to be visible all the time.

Well, you guys asked for it, and we listened. If you pass a parameter, showinfo=1, when creating the player, the list of video thumbnails will be permanently visible. Here’s an example:

The corresponding embedded player is shown below:

To see all of the parameters that the YouTube player supports, refer to the documentation. If you have any questions, feel free to post them to the YouTube API Google Group.

Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team

Upgrading Old Embed Codes

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

We’d like to let the community know about an upcoming change that will affect some developers using Flash-only players in their webpages or applications. Previously, a URL like http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID would default to the ActionScript 2 version of the Flash player, and it was necessary to explicitly add in the version=3 URL parameter to request the newer, ActionScript 3-based player. Starting on Wednesday, May 2, we will be changing the default behavior so that the ActionScript 3 player will be loaded in those scenarios.

This change to the default version affects both the Embedded and Chromeless Flash players. Developers who are using the newer <iframe> embedded player will not see any change, as that already defaults to the ActionScript 3 player when Flash playback is needed.

If for some reason you explicitly need the ActionScript 2 version of the player, perhaps because you’re hosting it from within a parent Flash container that was written in ActionScript 2, then you should change your code to explicitly add in the version=2 URL parameter to the player URL. Most developers will not need to do this, though, and they’ll automatically get the benefits of the modern ActionScript 3 playback experience without having to change their code.

As we’ve previously announced, the ActionScript 2 players are all officially deprecated, and have been for several years now. Our plan is to shut them down completely starting in October of this year, so while it is still possible to explicitly request them with version=2 if they’re needed, our recommendation is that you do not continue to rely on the ActionScript 2 player in your code.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Coming Soon: The Dark Player for Embeds

Friday, August 5, 2011

modestbrandingplayer parameters<iframe width="560" height="349"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9h1swNWgP8Q?theme=light&color=red"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The next step in embedded videos: HD preview images and a logoless option

Monday, June 13, 2011

(Cross-posted from The Official YouTube Blog.)It may be hard to imagine but YouTube’s video preview images represent to many the ultimate deciding factor as to whether or not they watch a video. If a preview image looks interesting, it can mean the difference between someone pressing the play button. In addition, your site and the videos on it represent to you polished masterpieces. Yet, your videos’ preview images can appear lower in quality, and sometimes you don't want a logo in your player. So today we're rolling out new features for both situations: HD preview images and the option to remove the logo from your player.

HD preview images
Video resolutions have been increasing across YouTube, and the sizes of your embedded players are bigger than ever. But until now, video preview images in today’s larger players (e.g. the image that appears before you click “Play”) haven’t kept up with your high-quality and larger videos.

Any new video uploaded to the site in a resolution of 480p or higher will have an HD preview image wherever the player is embedded. The difference is even more striking with larger embeds (which don’t fit on this blog), so try it out yourself and see what we’re talking about. Here’s an example:

Before:

Now:

We’ll also automatically give HD preview images to older videos in the next few weeks, as long as they’re 480p or larger.

A note for partners, if you’ve uploaded a custom preview image for your video, you’ll need to re-upload a new one for your videos in order to upgrade it to HD (1920 x 1080px, 2MB max).

Logoless player
Many of you have asked us for a version of the YouTube player without a YouTube logo, so the video plays without any branding nearby. We’ve now added a simple option to do it. At the end of the video URL in your embed code, just add the code ?modestbranding=1 and the player will show without the YouTube logo in the control bar. Note that a small “YouTube” text label will still show up in the upper-right corner of a paused video when you hover over the player. We’ve published the full list of the player’s possible parameters, and here’s an example:

We hope these features help you show your videos the way you want them to be seen.
Kevin Wilson, Software Engineer, recently watched “I'm Yours (ukulele)” and Ravi Kanodia, Software Engineer, recently watched “Candy BBQ - Epic Meal Time.”

HTTPS Support for YouTube Embeds

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

HTTPS, the secure counterpart to HTTP, wraps a layer of encryption around the information traveling between your computer and a web server. YouTube already uses HTTPS to encrypt sensitive data during the account login process. Now we’re planning a gradual expansion of HTTPS across other aspects of the site. The first place you may see HTTPS YouTube URLs is in our various embed codes, all of which currently support HTTPS in addition to the standard HTTP. Anyone can try HTTPS with YouTube embeds today—simply change the protocol portion of the URL from http to https. For example, http://www.youtube.com/embed/Zhawgd0REhA becomes https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zhawgd0REhA. This applies to URLs found in our newer <iframe> embeds as well as our older-style <object> + <embed> codes.
If any of your existing code attempts to parse YouTube embed URLs that are entered by end-users, it’s important that you support both HTTP and HTTPS as the URL’s protocol across all the varieties of YouTube embed codes.

Most web browsers will warn users when they access web pages via HTTPS that contain embedded content loaded via HTTP. If your main site is currently accessed via HTTPS, using the new HTTPS URLs for your YouTube embeds will prevent your users from running into that warning. If your site can be accessed either via HTTP or HTTPS, you could employ protocol-relative URLs instead of hardcoding a value; //www.youtube.com/ will automatically resolve to HTTP or HTTPS depending on the protocol used by the host page.

It’s very important to note that this is just a first step in enabling HTTPS for the entire YouTube viewing experience. In particular, only the YouTube player code is accessible via HTTPS at this time. The actual video bitstream, and some additional content loaded by the YouTube player may still be accessed via standard HTTP connections when you use an HTTPS URL in your embed code. Also note that HTTPS remains optional for YouTube embeds; we have no plans to turn off support for the HTTP URLs.

If you have any comments or questions about this change, please let us know in the YouTube API developer’s forum.

Cheers,
–Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

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.

Engineering and Developers Blog

The YouTube Player: Now with 30% More Playlistiness!

Upgrading Old Embed Codes

Coming Soon: The Dark Player for Embeds

The next step in embedded videos: HD preview images and a logoless option

HTTPS Support for YouTube Embeds

Enrich your site with YouTube Direct

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