YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: February 2009

YouTube API Outgrows Shy Adolescence, Now Social

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

getting more socialdocsfully customizable

protocol guideJavaPHPactivity viewer samplesource codeforumGoogle I/Osession

TubeLoc: An AS3 Player Wrapper Using LocalConnection

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools TeamTubeLoc

read the articleproject pageon the forum

YouTube APIs + iPhone = Cool mobile apps

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Update (Nov. 2013): The information in this blog post is out of date; the current best practice for embedding YouTube videos in an iOS application is to use the YouTube iframe Player within a UIWebView container.
Posted by Kuan Yong, YouTube APIs and Tools TeamTerms of Serviceunder certain conditions

Call the YouTube API Data API to search videos, get video metadata, etc. You should use our Objective C client library instead of trying to construct the HTTP request or parse the response by hand.

Invoke the native YouTube player on the iPhone to play videos.

Note that these two methods work only on an actual device, not in the iPhone simulator, since the latter does not have a YouTube player.Method 1: Open the YouTube play page URL (Easier) media tag in the API response with the application/x-shockwave-flash type. It should look something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/v/oHg5SJYRHA0&f=gdata_videos&c=ytapi-my-clientID&d=nGF83uyVrg8eD4rfEkk22mDOl3qUImVMV6ramM

If you don't see the c and d parameters in the URL, it's because you are not passing in your developer key and client ID in the request. While they are not mandatory for read requests, we highly recommend that you provide them in every API request.

2. Open the URL in your app by calling the openURL method on your UIApplication instance:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.youtube.com/v/oHg5SJYRHA0&f=gdata_videos&c=ytapi-my-clientID&d=nGF83uyVrg8eD4rfEkk22mDOl3qUImVMV6ramM"]];

When your app calls openURL, it will quit and launch the full native YouTube app on the phone. After the video stops playing, the user remains in the YouTube app. The user has no easy way of getting back to your app.

Method 2: Embed the YouTube player in a UIWebView
No, the iPhone still doesn't do Flash, but if you haven't already noticed, the Safari browser on the iPhone is clever enough to turn any YouTube embed into a clickable thumbnail that launches the native YouTube player app on the phone. You can take advantage of this feature in your app by using a UIWebView. Here's how:

1. Set up a UIWebView in your app. You can make it part of a xib or create it programmatically. Size the UIWebView according to how large you want the clickable thumbnail to be.

2. Grab the video url using the same method as the one described above.

3. Call the loadHTMLString:baseURL: method on the UIWebView instance with some carefully constructed HTML that contains the YouTube embedded player code snippet and some supporting HTML to make sure that the video thumbnail appears correctly. Set the base URL to the URL of your website (it doesn't do anything here -- ordinarily UIWebView uses it to handle relative URL links correctly).

The best way to illustrate this is with a code snippet. Note the use of the viewport HTML meta parameter and the consistent use of width and height parameters throughout.

// webView is a UIWebView, either initialized programmatically or loaded as part of a xib.

NSString *htmlString = @"<html><head>
<meta name = \"viewport\" content = \"initial-scale = 1.0, user-scalable = no, width = 212\"/></head>
<body style=\"background:#F00;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px\">
<div><object width=\"212\" height=\"172\">
<param name=\"movie\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/oHg5SJYRHA0&f=gdata_videos&c=ytapi-my-clientID&d=nGF83uyVrg8eD4rfEkk22mDOl3qUImVMV6ramM\"></param>
<param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\"></param>
<embed src=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/oHg5SJYRHA0&f=gdata_videos&c=ytapi-my-clientID&d=nGF83uyVrg8eD4rfEkk22mDOl3qUImVMV6ramM\"
type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" wmode=\"transparent\" width=\"212\" height=\"172\"></embed>
</object></div></body></html>";

[webView loadHTMLString:htmlString baseURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.your-url.com"]];
One of the biggest benefits of this approach is that your app does not have to quit in order for the video to start playing. In fact, the iPhone will keep your app running in the background while it fires up the YouTube player to play the video. After the video finishes playing (or when the user hits "Done"), the user is automatically taken back to your app. This experience is very similar to watching embedded YouTube videos in the iPhone Safari browser and is just as seamless.

Have fun writing the next killer iPhone app, and don't forget to list your app in the YouTube Project Gallery once it goes live in the App Store!

Coming up: Adding YouTube content to Android apps

Show Me the Money

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Posted by Kuan Yong, YouTube APIs Product Manager

everyone's mind latelydocumentTerms of ServiceYouTube Project Gallery

Engineering and Developers Blog

YouTube API Outgrows Shy Adolescence, Now Social

TubeLoc: An AS3 Player Wrapper Using LocalConnection

YouTube APIs + iPhone = Cool mobile apps

Show Me the Money

Labels

Archive

Feed