Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
It's that time again -- survey time. If you're a YouTube API developer, we'd love to know how it's going and what we can do better. Take a few minutes and fill out our ...Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
It's that time again -- survey time. If you're a YouTube API developer, we'd love to know how it's going and what we can do better. Take a few minutes and fill out our survey.
We always welcome feedback in the discussion forum of course, but this is a good way for the team to look at some aggregate data and determine where to put resources next year.
Google Desktop just got its own Desktop gadget for YouTube. It relies on Data API feeds to search YouTube and retrieve a feed of the day's most popular videos. It's also ...Read More
Posted by James Yum, Google Desktop Team
Google Desktop just got its own Desktop gadget for YouTube. It relies on Data API feeds to search YouTube and retrieve a feed of the day's most popular videos. It's also open source, so browse the source code to learn how to build a desktop app that uses the YouTube APIs. If have any questions or feedback, send an email to gd-developer AT gmail DOT com.
Guest Post by Claus Höfele, Software Developer at Team Bondi We have a guest blog post today by Claus Höfele, an Engine Programmer at Team Bondi, an independent game developer based Down Under. He has a detailed article featured in Gamasutra.com about how to integrate YouTube upload into a game, much like how it's integrated in Spore. In addition to working with game consoles, Claus has a long history in developing software for mobile devices and is the author of Mobile 3D Graphics: Learning 3D Graphics with the Java Micro Edition. ...Read More
Guest Post by Claus Höfele, Software Developer at Team Bondi We have a guest blog post today by Claus Höfele, an Engine Programmer at Team Bondi, an independent game developer based Down Under. He has a detailed article featured in Gamasutra.com about how to integrate YouTube upload into a game, much like how it's integrated in Spore. In addition to working with game consoles, Claus has a long history in developing software for mobile devices and is the author of Mobile 3D Graphics: Learning 3D Graphics with the Java Micro Edition. For some time now, I've been interested in how social networks can be incorporated into games. With the rise of multiplayer games, I believe this will be the next big thing for network-enabled games. Watching videos on YouTube is a favourite pastime of mine, so it didn't take long for me to decide that I wanted to check out the steps necessary to add a video recording feature to my games and share the recordings on YouTube.
Games are often written in C/C++, which allows a programmer to structure the code in a modular way, but also to program to the bare metal when needed. Although YouTube announced a partnership with Sony in which it offered its APIs on the PLAYSTATION 3, there's no publicly available C/C++ API to access YouTube. Fortunately, with the help of the developer documentation, YouTube's HTTP based protocol is straightforward to implement yourself. I used libcurl (HTTP processing), OpenSSL (HTTPS), and TinyXML (XML parsing) to help me with this task.
Wrapping my head around the available authentication options was probably the most difficult task. In the end, ClientLogin was the method of choice because my game demo is distributed as a standalone desktop application.
I was glad to see support for videos encoded in the Theora format on YouTube. Because Theora is a free and open video compression format, it avoids the licensing issues usually involved with video codecs.
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
We launched a new Application Gallery to feature projects that integrate with YouTube. This supersedes our previous forum wiki page and now also allows you to rate and comment on your favorite applications.Read More
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
We launched a new Application Gallery to feature projects that integrate with YouTube. This supersedes our previous forum wiki page and now also allows you to rate and comment on your favorite applications.
The new gallery is self-service so submit your application for inclusion today! Don't worry if your listing does not show up right away. We need a few days to review your app before including it in the gallery. If your app is rejected, please be sure to review our API Terms of Service again. Keep it classy, guys.
If you haven't written a YouTube app yet, this will be a great place to peruse examples and get inspiration.
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
We launched a great tool to help you play around with the Data API and wrap your head around all the basic API operations before diving into code.Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
We launched a great tool to help you play around with the Data API and wrap your head around all the basic API operations before diving into code.
Build query strings, experiment with the different feeds, and even make authenticated queries using AuthSub. This is also a great way to help debug problems with the API and compare responses against what you are seeing in your code.
Let us know if you have any feedback in the forum.
Posted by Andy Diamondstein, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
In the past few months, thousands of you posted questions in our API forum, many for the very first time in your lives, because you believed that your voice could make a difference. You know that the YouTube API can change, and you've asked if we can change it by adding new features and fixing bugs. Yes we can.Read More
Posted by Andy Diamondstein, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
In the past few months, thousands of you posted questions in our API forum, many for the very first time in your lives, because you believed that your voice could make a difference. You know that the YouTube API can change, and you've asked if we can change it by adding new features and fixing bugs. Yes we can.
What we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow. But there is so much more to do. And we want to be sure that we don't break your applications when we do it. And that's why we've released new backward compatibility guidelines to help ensure that your applications handle API changes gracefully.
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
I know as a developer it is frustrating when your code that was previously working suddenly breaks because of someone else's changes. In order to help catch new API bugs before they show up in our production API, we have added a new staged version of our API running on stage.gdata.youtube.com.Read More
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
I know as a developer it is frustrating when your code that was previously working suddenly breaks because of someone else's changes. In order to help catch new API bugs before they show up in our production API, we have added a new staged version of our API running on stage.gdata.youtube.com.
To use the staged instance, simply retrieve a feed from the different hostname. For example, instead of retrieving
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos
you would retrieve
http://stage.gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos
For uploads you can use:
http://uploads.stage.gdata.youtube.com/
This staged instance is not supported and will not have the reliability of the live API, so please do not use it in any live site. It is only to be used for testing your application against upcoming versions of the API to ensure that nothing is broken.
Go ahead and test your applications right now for the upcoming November release. In the future, we will pre-announce new versions of the API on stage once they are available on our announcement-only forum:
With Geo-based search for YouTube API, you can now find all those wonderful videos nearby a particular location. And of course, a visitor to your site is most likely interested in his/her current location when using this feature. This is where the Gears Geolocation API comes in handy.
Gears Geolocation API provides a best-effort approximation (WIFI-based for PC and GPS/CellID-based for mobile devices) of your physical location. When you combine these two features together, you can create some really interesting and useful applications. Check out this demo that I put together that let you geo-search for videos nearby your current location and overlay them with Google Maps. The demo source code for this can be found here.
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
We now have a demo of the YouTube Chromeless Player working from within ActionScript 3. Even better, this demo is part of an ...Read More
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
We now have a demo of the YouTube Chromeless Player working from within ActionScript 3. Even better, this demo is part of an open source project on Google Code. Best of all, there is an article about the sample that explains how the sample is constructed.
This is something we've been wanting to provide for a while, and the YouTube API team greatly appreciates the work of developer Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block for making it happen. Thanks Matthew!
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
The Java Client Library has been updated to support V2 of the YouTube API in its latest release. The Migration Guide has been updated with guidance on how to update your Java code. Just check the "Java" option at the top of the page.
If you encounter any issues upgrading to V2, come join us in the forum.
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
This release introduces the concept of API versioning. This allows us to make breaking changes to the API that you can enable in your applications when you are ready. The list of protocol changes are documented in our ...Read More
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
This release introduces the concept of API versioning. This allows us to make breaking changes to the API that you can enable in your applications when you are ready. The list of protocol changes are documented in our Migration Guide. V2 brings us in line with the AtomPub specification. Stay tuned for more information about how V2 affects all Google Data APIs on the Data APIs blog.
As promised in the title of this post, the Geo-based search feature requested by Issue 200 has been released using the location and location-radius parameters.
We encourage you to migrate to V2 as soon as you can to take advantage of these exciting features. Note that we will no longer be adding new features to V1.
For a complete list of our documentation changes, view the Revision History of our documentation.
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
A common way to use the YouTube API is to make a niche site -- YouTube isn't necessarily built to be a destination site for iguana lovers, or antique car racers, or people looking to learn Mandarin. Developers can use the API to create a rich supporting feature set for these communities. It's great to come across sites like this that are done well, so when I saw WatchToLearnChinese.com, I asked one of the creators, Philipp Lenssen, editor of Google Blogoscoped, to tell us more about the site. (I was also excited because it was a good way for me to brush up on my rusty Mandarin in time for a trip to Beijing!)Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
A common way to use the YouTube API is to make a niche site -- YouTube isn't necessarily built to be a destination site for iguana lovers, or antique car racers, or people looking to learn Mandarin. Developers can use the API to create a rich supporting feature set for these communities. It's great to come across sites like this that are done well, so when I saw WatchToLearnChinese.com, I asked one of the creators, Philipp Lenssen, editor of Google Blogoscoped, to tell us more about the site. (I was also excited because it was a good way for me to brush up on my rusty Mandarin in time for a trip to Beijing!)
Tell us about WatchToLearnChinese.com. We recently launched Watch to Learn Chinese, a site presenting over 500 Mandarin learning videos (as well as some Mandarin videos in general for advanced learners). We noticed so many great material already existing on YouTube that we wanted to utilize the YouTube API to bring it all on a site with special notes in Pinyin, that transliteration of Chinese using the Latin alphabet. After scouring hundreds of videos and sorting them into three difficulty levels, and assigning ratings specifically looking out for usefulness to learners, we opened the doors to present this as a free learning tool. While we don't want to and can't replace a Chinese teacher or learning books, we're hoping this can serve as additional material accompanying learning courses.
Beyond the videos, we've also added a game that mixes images (drawn ones, and Creative Commons-licensed photos), sounds, and text. My Chinese partner on this project had spoken a great deal of sentences into the microphone and I edited the sound into many little pieces to be used for the game (using the free Audacity editor). For the translations of the many words and sentences, we hired a translation company -- you provide them with a Word file or similar document, select your source and target language, and after some days, you can download the translated document (we've used Click2Translate.com, but you may also find another service you prefer). It might have been the first time that translation company was ever faced with the task of not only translating into Chinese, but also into accentuated Pinyin!
On that note, we've also added a YouTube channel with learning videos of our own.
Why did you decide to use the Chromeless Player instead of just embedding YouTube content the regular way? There were several reasons for this. For one thing, we wanted to completely customize the player -- including every last button, video buffer indicator, color and so on. (Inspiration for this approach came from TotLol.com, a YouTube API-based site for parents and their toddlers which I had reviewed as part of Blogoscoped.com, a news blog on Google topics.) Another feature of the YouTube API that came in very useful was that we were able to assign a start and end time for the core lesson of a video. Imagine you want to watch a series of 10 videos by the same presenter -- wouldn't it be nice to not always watch the 20 seconds intro, but skip right to the lesson material? (And if you do want to learn more about the presenter after the lesson, we grouped their other videos on our site and also link to their homepage, if we found one.)
Tell us a little more about the backend. Do you have any lessons learned for everyone at home? To let you find videos on the site, we set up a little PHP/MySQL engine which searches through video title and description. To optimize this process, we do some behind-the-scenes routines to check for "fuzzy" Pinyin matches. This is one example where you can build on existing videos but then add value by offering features specialized to that content. For instance, take the Chinese Pinyin word "wǒ mén", which means "we"; it was important that searchers should be able to enter this as "wǒ mén", "wǒmén", "women" and so on, and still find a match.
To manage video additions, we created a little private form where you input the YouTube URL, a title, a description, rating, type of learning course and so on. Once the form is submitted, the program will check for existing videos on the site to avoid duplicates, and then pulls the video thumbnail to store on our server. Now, a routine server-scheduled job (the Apache Cronjob) will check if the video still exists on YouTube, in case someone made it private, or disallowed embedding, or something else happened with it. When a problem is found we can see this in the management console and decide how to handle this problem, like by removing the video or looking for a replacement. Lesson learned: be conservative when you do the checking of availability and don't immediately hide display of videos on your site were you may suspect a problem. Thanks to an overzealous early version of our availability checker, which may have stumbled upon a changed HTML tag or similar on YouTube, WatchToLearnChinese.com was completely empty one morning... because all videos had been incorrectly flagged as unavailable by us!
And now, we're hoping for happy visitors to the site, and ponder ways of growing it in the future. It was certainly a lot of fun so far.
Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
If you are just getting started with our PHP Client Library and would like to verify that your installation is correct, you can now use a new tool to do so. I have just checked in the first version into the ...Read More
Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
If you are just getting started with our PHP Client Library and would like to verify that your installation is correct, you can now use a new tool to do so. I have just checked in the first version into the repository at the Zend Framework site.
The tool can run either from the command line or on your server. It verifies that:
SSL is enabled and that you can access the YouTube Data API
The sample output below shows the results of a successful installation:
jhartmann@mybox:~$ php VerificationChecker.php == Ran PHP Verification using CLI == PHP Extension Errors -- No errors found Zend Framework Installation Errors -- No errors found SSL Capabilities Errors -- No errors found YouTube API Connectivity Errors -- No errors found
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
As you guys know, many members of the team hang out in our discussion forum, where we field all kinds of questions, usually resulting in small snippets of code that aren't easy for other people to find. To house these snippets, a ...Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
The blog is actually for all the Google Data APIs, but many tips are general and relate to YouTube. You can also subscribe only to tags that you're interested in. Blogger (since it's a Google Data API, naturally) allows you to use the category filter and throw it into your feed reader of choice. For example, to get all tips for YouTube, use: http://gdatatips.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/youtube
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
The latest .NET Client Library release includes support for asynchronous API operations. This means you can now do things like upload videos in the background while the user continues to use your application. Read the full announcement on the ...Read More
Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
The latest .NET Client Library release includes support for asynchronous API operations. This means you can now do things like upload videos in the background while the user continues to use your application. Read the full announcement on the Google Data APIs blog.
Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
In YouTube API-land, we always love hearing about new API implementations that make sharing videos on YouTube more accessible to a large number of users. One such site that we recently learned about is ...Read More
Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
In YouTube API-land, we always love hearing about new API implementations that make sharing videos on YouTube more accessible to a large number of users. One such site that we recently learned about is One True Media.
One True Media lets you create great videos from scratch using your photographs and videos. By allowing you to add a range of transitions, music, video styles and effects, it makes it extremely easy to create compelling videos. Adding the "Upload to YouTube" functionality to their site has allowed One True Media to offer their users another way to share the videos that they create with friends, family and the world.
Below are extracts of a chat with some of the engineers from the One True Media team: Ian Lovejoy, Kevin Wong and Chris Hut. Hopefully there are technical and design lessons that you can glean from their experience.
Q: Why did you add the Upload to YouTube functionality to the One True Media site?
Our site is about re-inventing video-creation; making it as easy as possible for users to create videos. But its just as important to our users to be able to share the videos that they create and YouTube has proven to be a favorite way for our users to share what they create.
Q. What are the benefits to One True Media of adding the functionality?
Our users are that much happier! They love sharing their videos on YouTube. It's a great way for them to show off what they create. It drives them to create more content. For us, it's also a great way to showcase our tools and put our brand in front of the largest possible audience. Our users have actually started putting videos on YouTube on how to upload to YouTube from One True Media!
Q. What was your experience with the APIs like?
Overall, great! The API was pretty straightforward and we were able to implement the functionality pretty quickly. We encountered one bug, but Jeff in the API forum helped us with a workaround and the bug has since been fixed. The most annoying part was getting the AuthSub keys set up and that code working. It would help to have that better documented! (We're on it!)
Q. A personal confession: when I first tried to upload a personal video to YouTube from One True Media, it took me a while to figure out how to do it....
It was definitely hard to find the "Upload to YouTube" functionality to begin with. We've made it easier to find, moving it higher on the page of share options, and even surfacing it at different points in the user flow including the registration process and on other key pages. That's increased the number of uploads quite a bit, and correspondingly the views our users' videos got on YouTube!
Q. What are the some of the other things you learned about using the APIs?
Well, we've learned the value of making the feature easy to find. We also realized that by implementing AuthSub and keeping the user logged in, we could make the process that much smoother for users, and we believe this influenced the number of uploads significantly as well. We're now brainstorming ways to utilize other YouTube API features to improve what we can offer our users.
Thanks guys!
Play with One True Media's implementation at http://www.onetruemedia.com, and think about how using the YouTube APIs can enhance your product.
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
Here are some of the recent features that you may have missed.
Player updates
Specify starting point in an embed Want to skip to the good part? You can now specify when your video embed starts with thestart parameter.
Full screen mode Show the full screen button on the embedded player with the fs parameter.
Only the YouTube logo has clickthrough for Chromeless Player The Chromeless Player's click area is now only the YouTube logo. The rest of the video canvas does not go back to YouTube.com. This should make the fuller integrations with the Chromeless Player more seamless. Jeff talks about it in his groups post.
Data API updates
Batch operations You can now submit multiple operations per query. Closing out issue 79. See the docs for more details.
X-GData-Authorization header for user login The X-GData-Authorization header can now be used as an alternative to using the Authorization header for user login -- especially important for Flash developers.
Posted by Jeff Fisher & Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
We meet people at conferences and events all the time (just recently, at the Google Dance) who are just looking for a quick YouTube fix -- something easy to drop into their website or blog.
In the new overview page and Getting Started Guide, we highlighted simple solutions for people just looking for a little bit of YouTube, and fast. The Video Barand Video Search Control are widgets that are easy to configure and paste into a website. The YouTube custom player, which you can hook up to user uploads and other playlists, is also an easy way to update video content on your site without changing any code.
Posted by Jeff Fisher & Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
We meet people at conferences and events all the time (just recently, at the Google Dance) who are just looking for a quick YouTube fix -- something easy to drop into their website or blog.
In the new overview page and Getting Started Guide, we highlighted simple solutions for people just looking for a little bit of YouTube, and fast. The Video Barand Video Search Control are widgets that are easy to configure and paste into a website. The YouTube custom player, which you can hook up to user uploads and other playlists, is also an easy way to update video content on your site without changing any code.
So even if you've played around with the APIs before, now might be a good time to revisit all the things you can do! (It may be easier than you think.)
Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
If you use PHP to develop applications that interact with the YouTube API, you may be interested to know that I recently updated our ...Read More
Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
If you use PHP to develop applications that interact with the YouTube API, you may be interested to know that I recently updated our PHP Developer's Guide to cover helper methods that are available in the new version of the PHP Client Library (included in Zend Framework releases starting with 1.5.3).
The new helper methods eliminate the need to explicitly create a MediaGroup object. Instead, you can now set your video's metadata directly:
$myVideoEntry->setVideoTitle('My Test Movie'); $myVideoEntry->setVideoDescription('My Test Movie'); $myVideoEntry->setVideoCategory('Comedy'); $myVideoEntry->SetVideoTags('cars, funny');
Of course, posting a video entry without the helper methods will continue to work. More changes are in the pipeline, so keep your eyes open for further updates. If you notice typos or have feedback on any of our docs, feel free, as always, to post in the forum.
Posted by Christine Tsai, YouTube Syndication Product Marketing Manager
Back in May, you may remember that we announced a unique partnership with the PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3 TM) team which would allow game developers to integrate direct upload to YouTube from within PS3 games. We're excited that the latest game to feature YouTube upload functionality is ...Read More
Posted by Christine Tsai, YouTube Syndication Product Marketing Manager
Back in May, you may remember that we announced a unique partnership with the PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3TM) team which would allow game developers to integrate direct upload to YouTube from within PS3 games. We're excited that the latest game to feature YouTube upload functionality is PixelJunk™Eden, a PlayStation® Network title from the popular PixelJunk series.
For all you PixelJunk fans, you'll now be able to capture video of your game recordings and upload directly to YouTube. Here are a couple examples of videos captured in-game and uploaded to YouTube:
We've already seen the significant positive impact for games like Spore and Mainichi Issho and how gamers share & show off their creations. We look forward to the day when having YouTube upload support in games will be a standard feature.
As Q-Games President Dylan Cuthbert said on the Playstation Blog, "The YouTube upload feature is going to revolutionize how people share tips". We wholeheartedly agree!
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
All of the videos, slides, and other materials used during our first "Powered by YouTube" developer event are now online and available for mass consumption ...Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
All of the videos, slides, and other materials used during our first "Powered by YouTube" developer event are now online and available for mass consumption: http://sites.google.com/site/poweredbyyoutube
We had ~100 developers come and hang out with us at YouTube HQ. It was a full day, with talks ranging from best practices to the history of scaling up YouTube infrastructure and, of course, cookies, lunch and t-shirts. There were also some good discussions in our Office Hours lounge. If you're interested, the one-sheet Code Labs we had for working with the Data APIs in JSON and PHP are also available online.
Thanks to everyone for coming out, learning about the APIs, and sharing your feedback and questions with us. Special thanks goes to Slide, Qik, Animoto, Gaia Online, and Helio for speaking about their experiences working with our APIs and even walking through some code snippets.
Also, as a bonus, here's a bunch of us (Jochen, Jeff, myself) with Steve Mesa, the top poster in our discussion forum :)
If you've been following the progress of the Google Data APIs .NET client library, you may already know that we have just released version 1.2.1.0. This is good news for YouTube developers, as it finishes adding the class wrappers for the YouTube extension.
To correspond with this release, I've written a .NET Developer's Guide for YouTube, which explains how to perform all of the various API operations with notes and code snippets. This guide provides a nice starting point for those who haven't worked with our .NET client library before, but also provides a more complete reference for those have already started.
If you notice any typos or problems with our documentation, report them to the YouTube developer forum.
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
Have you used the YouTube APIs? We'd like to hear about how it went, and get your thoughts on how it could be easier. If you have a few minutes, take our ...Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
Have you used the YouTube APIs? We'd like to hear about how it went, and get your thoughts on how it could be easier. If you have a few minutes, take our survey.
Punch and pie for those that complete it! (Well, not really, but you will help us improve the developer resources available.)
You can, of course, always give feedback in our public discussion forum as well.
We have recently pushed a few updates to the YouTube API, so here's a quick overview of a few new features you can play with.Read More
Posted by Daniel Danciu, Software Engineer
We have recently pushed a few updates to the YouTube API, so here's a quick overview of a few new features you can play with.
Restrict for videos that have location information
You can now restrict your search to videos that have an associated location (latitude-longitude pair). Simply add a 'location=' empty parameter to the URL of your query, whether it is search, or a query for uploads, playlists or favorites:
This opens the gates for some pretty cool mashups that combine Google Maps and YouTube. (And closes out this feature request). We'll be doing some more work with geo in the future, so stay tuned.
Country request returned in the header
We now return the country the request came from in the X-GData-User-Country header of the response. For example, if you made the request from Switzerland, you'll see the following header in the response from the API server:
X-GData-User-Country: CH
This is useful in a few cases, the most common of which is an authenticated request to a user's own upload, favorites or playlists feed. The API will, in this case, return all videos in the feed, including the videos that are restricted in the country where the request was made from. Combine X-GData-User-Country with the tag to filter out these videos (for example, you can show the video's thumbnail but disable the playback).
Please note that in order to be able to view all videos of a user (including restricted or private videos), the request has to be authenticated and should not contain additional filtering parameters (like format or vq).
Don't forget that if you have your own website, you can always forward to the API (and we encourage you to do so) the country of origin or IP of origin of your requests using the restriction= parameter. This will ensure that videos are properly filtered for the location where your user is. In this case, the X-GData-User-Country response header will return the country specified in the restriction parameter.
It is different from most_viewed or top_rated in the sense that it uses a smarter algorithm to evaluate the popularity of a video. Oh, and if you're an international user, don't forget that the API supports standard feeds for all the countries YouTube does. For example, if you are interested in most popular videos in Germany, du kannst einfach:
** This is now called "Rising Videos" on the main site.
Same Authsub tokens for uploads.gdata.youtube.com and gdata.youtube.com
You can now use the same AuthSub token to query a user's inbox, to update a playlist or to upload a video, even with secure AuthSub. No need for hacks. Read more about AuthSub for YouTube in the docs.
Programmatic login token is valid for 2 weeks
We have extended the life time of the authentication token obtained via ClientLogin from 1 day to 2 weeks. This will hopefully enable a better user experience for all clients of installed applications by not forcing them to login every day.
Enjoy! If you have any questions or feedback, visit us in our developer forum.
Posted by Nikhil Chandhok, Product Manager - YouTube Syndication
Last March, over a lunch of fried macaroni and cheese, folks from EA and YouTube doodled about bringing the power of user-generated content to video games. After awhile, we decided that it would be cool if people could share their in-game user-generated content on YouTube as a way of demonstrating their super gaming skills, sharing accomplishments, and eventually telling more elaborate stories.Read More
Posted by Nikhil Chandhok, Product Manager - YouTube Syndication
Last March, over a lunch of fried macaroni and cheese, folks from EA and YouTube doodled about bringing the power of user-generated content to video games. After awhile, we decided that it would be cool if people could share their in-game user-generated content on YouTube as a way of demonstrating their super gaming skills, sharing accomplishments, and eventually telling more elaborate stories.
Today, we are happy to announce that our doodles have turned into reality with the launch of EA's Spore Creature Creator with YouTube APIs built into it, allowing users to share their creativity with others. Starting today, users can download the Creature Creator, build a wacky creature, and then upload their creations directly to YouTube. We announced this back in March and needless to say, we're ecstatic that the Creature Creator is now open for business. A pretty active community on YouTube has already uploaded thousands of videos.
I've highlighted some of my favorite creature videos, all uploaded from the Creature Creator:
If you haven't tried creating your own creature, you can download the Creature Creator from the Spore website. You can even enter your creature in EA's Ultimate Spore Creature Creator Dance-off contest. More information about this contest is available on the Spore YouTube channel. You can also try out YouTube's AudioSwap feature to set your creature's dancing to music.
As the world of the web and gaming meet, we are looking for interesting ways to create new entertainment experiences. In May, we announced a similar partnership with Sony Computer Entertainment which gives PS3 game developers a simple way to incorporate video upload into their video games. We continue to explore this very new and interesting space and hope that developers will continue to use our APIs in new and exciting ways!
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
Since our big launch back in March, we've held a few sessions here and there -- Google I/O and smaller hackathons, and it's been really fun meeting you guys in person. So we thought it was about time to have our own event here at the office in San Bruno (check out the video to see a bit of the office). This will be all YouTube APIs, all the time! The agenda is still being finalized, but we'll have "bigger picture" sessions as well as nitty gritty hacking time to get started and learn best practices. You'll have time to mingle with a diverse set of developers from different companies and the YouTube engineers and product managers.Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
Since our big launch back in March, we've held a few sessions here and there -- Google I/O and smaller hackathons, and it's been really fun meeting you guys in person. So we thought it was about time to have our own event here at the office in San Bruno (check out the video to see a bit of the office). This will be all YouTube APIs, all the time! The agenda is still being finalized, but we'll have "bigger picture" sessions as well as nitty gritty hacking time to get started and learn best practices. You'll have time to mingle with a diverse set of developers from different companies and the YouTube engineers and product managers.
If you're interested, here are all the details:
Thursday, July 10, 2008 10:30am - 5:00pm (tentative) YouTube HQ @ 901 Cherry Ave. San Bruno, CA 94066 Cost: Free
Many of us have created fun and exciting websites using the YouTube APIs, but w hy write an app that looks like everyone else's? The creative minds at ...Read More
Posted by Kuan Yong, Product Manager
Many of us have created fun and exciting websites using the YouTube APIs, but why write an app that looks like everyone else's? The creative minds at Dipity have shown us that video sites can be much more than just a collection of video listings and embedded players. Dipity's TimeTube is a great example of how you can massage the rich video metadata that our APIs provide to transform the way people browse and interact with videos. TechCrunched on May 9, TimeTube has soared in popularity. Derek Dukes, Co-Founder of Dipity, gives us the inside scoop. Tell us about Dipity. What's your origin story? (And favorite YouTube video).
Dipity was started by 3 friends with the mission of improving the context of information on the web and integrating text, audio, video, images and maps together on interactive timelines. We started the company in April last year after realizing we'd been independently working on similar ideas and there was starting to be the beginnings of a broader meme. Since then we've worked on the core technology, added a few new people to the mix, launched the site and rolled out an API and a couple of mash-ups.
As for my favorite YouTube video, right now it's the Chad Vader version of Chocolate Rain, but I'm sure in the next couple days I'll find something else that takes the top spot.
Tell us about TimeTube. How'd you come up with it? What's next?
We got the idea for TimeTube shortly after completing work on our own set of APIs. As you know the best way to find limitations and bugs in your APIs is to try and build something interesting and see what falls on the floor and where you run in to limitations. It started as one of our hack days which we do every other week (our version of 20% time) and once we saw how compelling the results were, we added some features and decided to release it as a formal mash-up. In terms of how successful it's been we've been pretty blown away. After it moved quickly from 'hot in tech' to the front page of Digg, we got picked up by blogs like TechCrunch, Life Hacker and were even featured on the Net@Night podcast. From there the blog-o-sphere took over and we're still getting picked up by blogs here and there. Going forward, we're looking at different enhancements and responding to user feedback so look for updates in the future.
Tell us about the implementation. How'd you do it?
We had the YouTube interaction and timeline creation done in a few hours. The backend is written in PHP using the Dipity API and the Google Data PHP client library. We perform a search query with the YouTube API, iterating over the results and creating an event on a Dipity timeline for the most relevant videos (currently capped at 50). We keep a mapping of search terms to timelines to avoid duplicates. Searches mapped to an existing timeline are refreshed if the timeline is more than 24 hours old. The Dipity API and embeddable timeline widget provide for most of the heavy lifting, while a few hundred lines of PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS glue it all together.
Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, Partner Technology Manager - YouTube
A little after I started at YouTube I casually asked my young niece, who seemed pretty impressed when I told her that I worked here, if she'd watch YouTube on television. She thought for a while before finally asking hesitantly, "But what would YouTube look like on TV?" I have a much better answer for her these days than I did then ...Read More
Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, Partner Technology Manager - YouTube
A little after I started at YouTube I casually asked my young niece, who seemed pretty impressed when I told her that I worked here, if she'd watch YouTube on television. She thought for a while before finally asking hesitantly, "But what would YouTube look like on TV?" I have a much better answer for her these days than I did then!
The YouTube Syndication team is excited that our users now have a number of options to consume YouTube on their television sets. We're proud to have helped many leaders in the consumer electronics space create YouTube experiences on TV.
Getting YouTube right on TV is extremely challenging from both a design and technology perspective. Each of our partners' engineering and design teams had similar questions:
* What would users, accustomed to a simple remote control interface for their TVs, expect given their typcially much richer interaction options when surfing youtube.com? * How could the YouTube experience be personalized for TV? * How could the extra computing power and memory often required to make this work on their devices be added effectively? * What were the most important YouTube features to retain, and how would they translate to a 10-feet user experience?
All these partners used the YouTube APIs to build their products. One partner's summary of their experience with the APIs: "The YouTube API was very simple, but powerful. It enabled us to develop our user interface flexibly and quickly." Music to our ears!
Here's a quick overview of some products that enable you to access YouTube from your living room...or anywhere else you may have your television(s)!
AppleTV: In June 2007 this became the first product to offer a way to watch YouTube on your TV.
Sony Bravia Internet Video Link: Last week, Sony announced the general availability of YouTube content on their Bravia TVs via the Internet Video Link. Some clips from the YouTube team at the event are linked below. Nice tie, Brent!
Panasonic: At CES 2008, Panasonic announced VieraCast, which allows you to access YouTube directly from your TV. The device will be available later this month.
Samsung: Samsung launched their IPTV device which supports YouTube (currently only available in South Korea) in early May.
We're excited that the YouTube APIs have enabled these products and look forward to sharing information about even more products, upgrades and innovations from our partners going forward. The following may seem like a "marketing way" to say it, but it is true! We're determined to see more devices and applications "Powered by YouTube" so that our vision of "YouTube Everywhere" feels even more real to our users.
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
Last week, the team spent an exciting couple of days at Google I/O. We all had a lot of fun, gave a few sessions, met a ton of people, and had good questions and discussions with developers. The best part was hanging out at the booth, talking to people one-on-one, seeing their projects, and hearing about other cool YouTube sites that are out there. For example ...Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
Last week, the team spent an exciting couple of days at Google I/O. We all had a lot of fun, gave a few sessions, met a ton of people, and had good questions and discussions with developers. The best part was hanging out at the booth, talking to people one-on-one, seeing their projects, and hearing about other cool YouTube sites that are out there. For example,
In a discussion about mobile, a developer pointed us to a QR code generator for YouTube videos. This site generates an image that, if you have the right software installed on your phone, will link you directly to the video URL if you take a picture of it on your phone.
If you're interested in the YouTube sessions, you can find the the videos and slideshere. Specifically, John's Data API overview, and Geoff's player APIs session are available.
Since the codelab (about using the APIs with App Engine) wasn't filmed, you can find all the materials below.
You can check all the code out from SVN, or just download the zip files. We also posted our slides and the standalone extensions to the client library as well: http://code.google.com/p/hello-youtube/downloads/list
We also took some videos (of course) and photos from the booth. Below is a playlist with some of us at the booth:
The album with pics from the booth and some of the sessions:
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
The week has been a little hectic since much of the team is busy prepping for Google I/O, which is less than a week away! If you're going, be sure to check out one (or three) of the YouTube sessions ...Read More
Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
The week has been a little hectic since much of the team is busy prepping for Google I/O, which is less than a week away! If you're going, be sure to check out one (or three) of the YouTube sessions:
YouTube on Your Site: John Harding will give a full overview of the YouTube Data API and what it can do.
Design Your Own YouTube Player: Geoff Stearns will show you how to use the YouTube player APIs to build custom controls for videos on your site.
Hands-on YouTube: Creating Applications with the YouTube Data APIs and App Engine: Jochen Hartmann and I will lead a Code Lab on how to use the Python Client Library to quickly launch applications with App Engine.
If you're already a pro, just drop by and say hi to the team at the YouTube booth. :) There will be many other sessions too, of course. The final list is of over 80 in-depth, technical sessions focused on building the next generation of web apps.
If you're interested, but haven't gotten your tickets, it's not too late to register. Hope to see you there!
Posted by Nikhil Chandhok, Product Manager for YouTube Syndication
Back in March, we launched the new YouTube APIs and Tools, with the goal of making YouTube an open video services platform and available for use by any website, desktop application, or consumer device. Today, we are announcing a new partnership that takes advantage of the YouTube APIs in a new and interesting way.Read More
Posted by Nikhil Chandhok, Product Manager for YouTube Syndication
Back in March, we launched the new YouTube APIs and Tools, with the goal of making YouTube an open video services platform and available for use by any website, desktop application, or consumer device. Today, we are announcing a new partnership that takes advantage of the YouTube APIs in a new and interesting way.
We are happy to announce that PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3TM) has integrated the YouTube APIs to allow game developers to create games that enable direct upload of in-game video captures to YouTube. This YouTube upload functionality can be incorporated not only into new PS3 game titles, but also existing PS3 titles that have the ability to receive network updates. Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has added YouTube functionality to Mainichi Issho, a popular game with PS3 users in Japan. Gamers will now be able to upload their in-game video captures to YouTube. We're excited at the opportunity this presents and look forward to more and more games to be enhanced with YouTube.
The YouTube APIs are available to all developers and we hope that game developers everywhere will use the YouTube APIs to make video an integral part of their game experience. Whether it's showing off that fantastic touchdown pass, car slide, or karaoke sing-along, we hope that more user-generated content from games will make their way to YouTube and connect with the gamer communities.
Let the games begin!
* PS3 system software must be updated to the latest version. * “PLAYSTATION” is a registered trademark and “PS3” is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
In our new video, I demonstrate how to use the YouTube API with the PHP client library to upload a video to YouTube. The screencast explains the most important parts of the YouTube demo application and includes a section on AuthSub authentication.Read More
Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team
In our new video, I demonstrate how to use the YouTube API with the PHP client library to upload a video to YouTube. The screencast explains the most important parts of the YouTube demo application and includes a section on AuthSub authentication.
* For a higher quality version of the video, click on the "watch video in high quality" link on the YouTube watch page.
Also, in case you missed it, Stephanie has a tutorial on the YouTube Player APIs.
We wanted to take a minute and highlight some developers like yourselves who have been writing helpful tutorials or wrappers for the YouTube Data APIs.
We wanted to take a minute and highlight some developers like yourselves who have been writing helpful tutorials or wrappers for the YouTube Data APIs.
In case you missed the announcement, we recently added YouTube support into the Google Data Objective-C Library. Not long after, Dan Sinclair, wrote a few helpful tutorials about getting started building a YouTube app in Cocoa. Check 'em out here:
For the ActionScript 3 developers who want help querying and parsing Google Data feeds from Flash, Martin Legris wrote a small wrapper and also contributed an article to code.google.com on how to use it.
In case you haven't heard, we're holding our annual developer event, Google I/O, on May 28-29th. Google I/O is a 2 day developer gathering in San Francisco focused on how to build better web applications.Read More
Hi everyone,
In case you haven't heard, we're holding our annual developer event, Google I/O, on May 28-29th. Google I/O is a 2 day developer gathering in San Francisco focused on how to build better web applications.
There are a few YouTube-specific sessions about building custom players, fully integrating YouTube into your site or app, and a codelab using the APIs and Python. The talks will led by Geoff, John, and Jochen respectively (check out the launch video to put some names to faces).
Jeff, Ryan and I (you may recognize us from the forum) will also be there giving talks or helping out. Other Google engineers will be leading sessions and codelabs on a variety of topics, as well as hanging around booths to chat with you guys and answer questions.
Sign up early (or start bugging your bosses to send you to the conference :). We hope to see you there!
For those of you can't make it to San Francisco, or are wondering what happened to Google Developer Day from last year, don't despair! We'll also be holding many Developer Days around the world (more info to come later).
Hopefully, you've all had time to digest our last big announcement. If you don't know where to start with all the new functionality, and you're near Mountain View, CA (or like to travel!), we'll be holding a "media themed" hackathon with the YouTube and Picasa APIs at the Googleplex on Thursday, March 27th - just over a week from now.Read More
Hi everyone,
Hopefully, you've all had time to digest our last big announcement. If you don't know where to start with all the new functionality, and you're near Mountain View, CA (or like to travel!), we'll be holding a "media themed" hackathon with the YouTube and Picasa APIs at the Googleplex on Thursday, March 27th - just over a week from now.
We'll have intro sessions, as well as codelabs to get you started. If you've already dived into the docs, you can also stop by just to meet the team, ask questions, or find other developers to work on projects with.
There will be two sessions -- one from 3PM-6:30PM and another from 6:30 - 10PM. Feel free to stay the whole day, or just come for the session you have time for. Don't worry about food and caffeine -- we've got you covered.
Since the initial YouTube Data API launch back in August, the team has been hard at work completing a whole suite of tools and features to make it possible for you to fully integrate YouTube into your sites and applications.Read More
Hi everyone,
Since the initial YouTube Data API launch back in August, the team has been hard at work completing a whole suite of tools and features to make it possible for you to fully integrate YouTube into your sites and applications.
Here's the sound byte: We now support upload, other write operations, and internationalized standard feeds. (And there was much rejoicing!) We're also introducing player APIs and a chromeless player -- a barebones player SWF that's fully customizable and controllable using the player APIs. (Thus, closing out thesefivefeaturerequestsin the issue tracker.)
We've also released a new Terms of Service that you'll want to check out if you're going to use the API.
Read below for a little more detail, watch the team talk about what's new, or dive right into the documentation.
Authentication, Upload, and Other Write Calls
Two types of authentication are now available to allow your users to log into their YouTube accounts on your site. AuthSub (proxy auth for web applications) and ClientLogin (for installed applications). If you've used other Google Data APIs, this should be very familiar to you.
Now that you can authenticate users, that means your users can upload to YouTube, comment on videos, manipulate playlists, and more, all without leaving your site or app. Check out the protocol guide and the reference guide for all the gory details.
Internationalization
Wie geht's? Bonjour, comment allez-vouz? Come stai? You can now access internationalizedfeeds in the 18 domains that YouTube supports.
For the first time, we're giving you hooks inside the YouTube embedded player with the JavaScript API. Instead of a black box, you'll now be able to control the player (stop, play, mute, seek, etc.), access the state of the player (ie. playing, buffering, stopped), and see how far along the video is (how many bytes loaded, how far into the video).
If that's not enough control, we've also got the new chromeless player. You can add all of your own buttons and aesthetics to make YouTube fit in with your site, and control it with the player APIs.
Flash APIs are also available with identical calls if you want to load our player into your Flash app.
Check out my short tutorial video on this if you don't feel like reading through docs just yet.
Too overwhelmed with all the new possibilities? You might want to check out some case studies from some of our testers who have already integrated with YouTube.
Also, mark your calendars -- we're holding a YouTube/Picasa specific hackathon on March 27th at the Googleplex in Mountain View if you want to meet the team in person.
Phew! Okay, that was a lot to digest, so when you're ready, let us know what you think over at the developers forum. We can't wait to see what you guys build.
Starting today, we'll be pushing out some changes to the serving infrastructure in a limited rollout. Developers using our APIs and embedded players should not notice any issues -- but if you're using an unsupported method to get at YouTube content, you may start to see some intermittent problems with playback. If you fall into the latter category, I strongly encourage you to switch over to a supported way of accessing YouTube.Read More
Hi everyone,
Starting today, we'll be pushing out some changes to the serving infrastructure in a limited rollout. Developers using our APIs and embedded players should not notice any issues -- but if you're using an unsupported method to get at YouTube content, you may start to see some intermittent problems with playback. If you fall into the latter category, I strongly encourage you to switch over to a supported way of accessing YouTube.
For Flash developers, you may have missed the fact that you can now make API calls directly from Flash/Flex apps. We recently put up a crossdomain.xml file on gdata.youtube.com (closing out this feature request in the issue tracker).
We hope this will make things easier for some of you! Having YouTube all over the web (and beyond) is one of our goals, so we want to help you as much as we can. The team is working on tools to give you more control over the YouTube experience on your site -- like a player API for the embedded player (star this issue in the tracker to receive updates on it).
As always, post any feedback or questions in the forum.
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It's that time again -- survey time. If you're a YouTube API .png)
It's that time again -- survey time. If you're a YouTube API 
