YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: November 2010

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

More Channels to Feed On

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The YouTube API’s standard feeds are a great way to expose your users to the best of what YouTube has to offer. To compliment the existing standard video feeds, which contain lists of individual videos that meet certain criteria (the top rated videos in the United States for the current day, for instance), we’re happy to introduce a new set of standard channel feeds.
While standard video feeds contain lists of videos, standard channel feeds contain lists of channels, or user accounts. The two types of standard channel feeds are most_viewed and most_subscribed, and just like with video feeds you can narrow down your results even further with time, region, and category or user type parameters. For example, the URL for requesting the most viewed channels with videos related to music in Great Britain for the past week is http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/channelstandardfeeds/GB/most_viewed/-/Music?v=2&time=this_week. Each entry in a standard channel feed provides detailed information about a specific YouTube channel, including a element with info on how many comments, videos, and views that channel has received.

Once you have these lists of channels, a natural next step would be to allow your logged-in users to subscribe to a given channel or view a list of videos uploaded in that channel.

Standard channel feeds are only available in version 2 of the YouTube API, which will soon be the default version in the production environment. In the meantime, be sure to explicitly specify that you want to use version 2 when making your YouTube API requests.

Cheers,
Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Google

Labels: channels , feeds

Update to the ClientLogin URL

Thursday, November 4, 2010

We want to let the developer community know about a change to the officially supported URL for YouTube API ClientLogin requests. Previously, developers who wanted to obtain authentication credentials via a username and password had to send their ClientLogin request to https://www.google.com/youtube/accounts/ClientLogin. The new URL that we encourage all developers to use is https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin. This new URL has been functional for a while, and is the same URL that other Google APIs use for ClientLogin requests. Switching YouTube API ClientLogin traffic to the standard URL ensures that developers across all of Google’s APIs will see standard behavior when logging users in.

All of the details regarding this switch as well as best practices for performing ClientLogin requests can be found in our YouTube API documentation. There is one specific change in behavior that is worth calling out: responses from the new ClientLogin URL will not include the YouTube username of the authenticated user, which the old URL’s responses did provide. We encourage developers to take advantage of the username default when constructing YouTube API request URLs, which always refers to the currently logged in user.

We have no immediate plans to disable the old ClientLogin URL, but we do encourage developers to update their code at their earliest convenience to point to the new URL. We will post again with further details if and when the legacy URL is turned off.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team