YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: June 2011

Sunsetting the Custom Player

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

YouTube previously offered a specialized way of embedding playlists (as well as uploads and favorites feeds) for playback on third party sites in a customizable interface—we called this the Custom Player. While the Custom Player had its fans, it never saw a great deal of usage, and we recently removed support for the creation of new Custom Players. If you’ve already created a Custom Player and have it embedded on your site it should continue to work as-is; the only thing that has changed is that new Custom Players cannot be created.

One common concern is that owners cannot update the videos featured in existing Custom Players. We recommend that you update the associated playlist to reflect the videos that you would like to feature in the Custom Player, or embed a new playlist.

While we will not allow for the creation of new custom players at this time, similar functionality is available through creating embedded playlists, which can be accessed by visiting http://youtube.com/my_playlists, clicking Share, and then using the embed code given there.

We apologize that taking away the ability to create new Custom Players caught anyone off guard. Stay tuned to this blog for upcoming announcements about modern alternatives to the Custom Player—we’ve got some exciting things in store!

Cheers,
—David Boyle, YouTube Team

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.”

YouTube @ Google I/O: API Bootcamp

Monday, June 13, 2011

There was more to Google I/O 2011 than formal presentations—Google I/O BootCamp was a day-long developer event geared towards providing beginning-level content to newer developers. Two engineers who work on the YouTube Data API, Raul Furnică and Günther Noack, participated in a BootCamp session that introduced the YouTube Data API and covered examples of how it could be used to discover and curate YouTube content.

If you’re just getting started with the YouTube Data API and want an overview of what it offers, or if you have a particular interest developing apps for content curation, please do check out the session video embedded below!

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

YouTube @ Google I/O: All About Captioning

Friday, June 3, 2011

Google I/O 2011 may be over, but we’re continuing our series of blog posts recapping the great developer material covered at the event. We previously covered our talk on the iframe Player API, and the next presentation we’re highlighting is “The YouTube Caption API, Speech Recognition, and WebVTT captions for HTML5”.

The session features Jeff Posnick from the YouTube Developer Relations team, Naomi Black from the Accessibility Engineering team, and Cynthia Boedihardjo, a Live Stream Program Manager. As the session’s title suggests, a number of different topics were covered, with video accessibility and captions the common theme throughout.

The material covering the YouTube Captions API, including a sample application that demonstrates using the API from Python, will be of particular interest to the YouTube API developer community. The talk also includes some early WebKit demos of WebVTT implementations for the <track> element in HTML5 as well as more information and stats about the Live Caption gadget launched at Google I/O. The gadget provides captions alongside streaming video.

The full video of the session is embedded below, and the slides from the talk are available as well.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Engineering and Developers Blog

Sunsetting the Custom Player

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

YouTube @ Google I/O: API Bootcamp

YouTube @ Google I/O: All About Captioning

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