YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: April 2012

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

An Update to our Deprecation Policy

Friday, April 20, 2012

As you might have seen announced on our Google Developers blog, the deprecation policies associated with many of Google’s APIs are changing. We want to highlight the specific way this affects YouTube API developers.

As of today, our YouTube API deprecation policy states:
Google will announce if we intend to discontinue or make backwards incompatible changes to this API or Service. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to continue to operate the YouTube API without these changes until the later of: (i) one year after the announcement or (ii) April 20, 2015, unless (as Google determines in its reasonable good faith judgment):

required by law or third party relationship (including if there is a change in applicable law or relationship), or
doing so could create a security risk or substantial economic or material technical burden.

This Deprecation Policy doesn't apply to versions, features, and functionality labeled as "experimental."Please note that while the deprecation policy listed above is current as of the date of this blog post, the definitive version of the policy can always be found in our Terms of Service.Cheers,—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Google

Labels: deprecation , policy , tos

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