YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: iphone

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

Resources for Mobile Development with YouTube

Friday, September 24, 2010

The importance of mobile applications in our day-to-day lives continues to grow. We can now do so many things with our phones that would have been impossible not too long ago. While watching videos on mobile devices has been popular for quite some time, mobile uploads to YouTube grew by 160% last year. Mobile application developers can take advantage of this growth by incorporating different types of functionality. Many interesting YouTube projects combine video capture, uploading, sharing and playback, with application logic executing both on the mobile device and in the cloud. With that in mind, we've compiled this article to help developers quickly get up to speed on what is involved in building one, please let us know what you think!Update:article

YouTube 移动应用程序开发参考资料
YouTube 行動應用程式開發資源
携帯端末向け開発リソース YouTube
YouTube를 통한 모바일 개발 도움말
Recursos para desenvolvimento de aplicativos para celular com o YouTube
Ресурсы для разработки мобильных приложений, интегрированных с YouTube
Recursos de desarrollo para móviles con YouTube

Thanks,-Jarek Wilkiewicz, YouTube API Team

Google

Labels: android , iphone , mobile , youtube direct

YouTube Direct for Mobile, and Other Updates

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Since launching YouTube Direct last November, our team has been hard at work adding new functionalities, fixing bugs, and answering developer's questions. We wanted to take a momentary break from all that to share some updates.Separate from but related to the main YouTube Direct project are two other Google Code projects: video capture and YouTube Direct upload applications for the Android and iPhone operating systems. These two projects are basic implementations that we hope will inspire organizations to add video capture and YouTube Direct upload functionality to their Android or iPhone applications.We've been gradually, and quietly, checking in various bug fixes and enhancements to the current release's Subversion repository on Google Code. One recent change is especially important, as it adds support for the new video page URLs that will start becoming more common. Periodically, we package the current release into a new "tagged" release, and generate release notes summarizing what's new. If you haven't updated your YouTube Direct codebase recently, we strongly suggest that you read the release notes and perform a sync with our code repository. Starting with the next YouTube Direct release, we will send email announcements to the low-traffic, announce-only Google Group. We recommend that all developers using YouTube Direct sign up to the group — actually, all YouTube API users should sign up to receive periodic important notifications.Many organizations, in addition to our launch partners, have deployed YouTube Direct on their websites since our launch, and we wanted to highlight a few here.Gannett rolled out a company-wide initiative in honor of Black History month, in which they ask people to interview civil rights heroes via video. Al-Jazeera invited the community to share their thoughts and experiences around Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrammage to Mecca. And if you have news videos around any of the big stories of the day, ITN News wants them. Even Tufts University is using YouTube Direct to solicit personal videos from the community called "You, in One Minute".As always, the best resource for developers looking to embed YouTube Direct functionality on their website is our Getting Started Guide. If you have any technical questions about YouTube Direct, our YouTube API Developer's Google Group is the place to turn.Cheers,-Jeff Posnick on behalf of the YouTube Direct Team

Google

Labels: android , iphone , mobile , youtube direct , ytd

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