Dedicated readers of this blog will remember our post from a few months back entitled “ClientLogin #FAIL”. In it, we laid out a number of scenarios in which attempts to use ClientLogin authentication would result in an error (and urged developers to move off of ClientLogin in general). The first failure scenario involved users whose YouTube account is not linked to a Google Account. Fortunately, the number of YouTube accounts in that unlinked state has decreased greatly over the past few months, so failures of that sort with ClientLogin are not as common now.

There’s another related failure scenario that we want to bring to everyone’s attention, this time involving both AuthSub and OAuth (collectively referred to here as “auth”) tokens. Starting on Wednesday, August 31, if your code attempts to use an auth token that was generated for an unlinked YouTube account, your request will fail with an HTTP 401 response code indicating that the token is invalid.

It’s important to note that what determines when the token is invalid is whether the YouTube account was linked at the time the initial auth token was generated. For example, if your code generated the auth token for an unlinked YouTube account on March 1, and then the user linked their YouTube and Google accounts on March 2, the auth token will still be considered invalid.

On March 31 we started to enforce the need to have a linked Google Account as part of the AuthSub and OAuth login flow, meaning that it was impossible to generate an auth token for an unlinked YouTube account after that date. So this change can only affect auth tokens generated before March 31 of this year.

While auth tokens normally don’t expire, users have the option of manually revoking them. If your code uses a revoked token, you’ll also get back an HTTP 401 response. If you’re using a client library, it will generate an exception to indicate the failure. It’s a best practice to make sure that your code handles invalid token errors by asking your user to go through the AuthSub or OAuth login flow again, storing the new token value and discarding the old one in the process.

If you have any questions about YouTube API authentication, please let us know in our developer forum.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team



While the YouTube Data API’s RESTful nature means that talking to YouTube is as easy as making an HTTP request, using a client library is a great way to improve your YouTube Data API productivity and write code using your preferred language’s native features. PHP developers using the Zend framework have had access to a client library for a while now, and that library continues to be a supported way of using the YouTube API. But if you’re a PHP developer using the CodeIgniter framework, you’ll be happy to hear that there’s now an alternative client library available just for you.

A third-party developer, Jim Saunders, has developed a YouTube Data API library specifically for the CodeIgniter framework. You download the library on GitHub, and read the article he’s written to find out how to get started with some sample code.

While Jim wrote and still maintains the library, please feel free to ask any questions about the YouTube API in general in our developer forum!

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

You may have noticed that we’ve changed the look of the player on YouTube. You may even have noticed that we’ve been experimenting with changing the look of embedded players too. Coming up on August 10, all embeds will automatically be updated to the new "dark player" ...
You may have noticed that we’ve changed the look of the player on YouTube. You may even have noticed that we’ve been experimenting with changing the look of embedded players too. Coming up on August 10, all embeds will automatically be updated to the new "dark player":



Although we’re very excited about this change, which comes after months of design, research, and experimentation, we realize that some embedders would prefer a lighter color to match a lighter webpage, so we’re also announcing a few other themes that we’ll be making available. We also realize that some embedders would prefer something more mild than our use of red, so we’re happy to introduce a "desaturated" color option without any bright colors at all. (Note: Using the desaturated color disables the modestbranding option.)

To pick an alternate theme, pass in values for the "theme" and "color" player parameters. For instance, if you’d like to keep the traditional colors, you can pass parameters such as:
<iframe width="560" height="349"
  src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9h1swNWgP8Q?theme=light&color=red"
  frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team
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