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YouTube for Developers on... YouTube!

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

For almost a year, we’ve been recording weekly shows for YouTube API developers as part of the Google Developers Live series, hosted on the Google Developers YouTube channel. Now, if you want to get just YouTube API-related videos, check out the new YouTube for Developers channel.On our new channel, you’ll find an up to date playlist of all our YouTube Developers Live shows (which we’ve also embedded below), as well as other playlists with videos related to the API. We still recommend subscribing to Google Developers as well, especially if you plan to work with multiple Google APIs in your applications.Not surprisingly, we’re using the YouTube Data API v3 to maintain the YouTube Developers Live playlist, and also to post channel bulletins whenever any video related to YouTube is added to the Google Developers channel. If you’re interested in doing this type of automatic curation in your own channels, you can take a look at the open source Ruby script that does the work for us.

Cheers,

—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Keeping Up with YouTube API Updates

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

As the YouTube APIs continue to evolve, release notes are a good place to keep track of improvements. However, with a busy life, you may not remember checking regularly for updates. Now, for the first time, you can subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified as soon as new features are available.

The release notes for all of the YouTube APIs and widgets have their own corresponding RSS feed.
Feeds are available for:

YouTube Data API (v3)

YouTube Analytics API

YouTube Android Player API

YouTube IFrame Player API

YouTube JavaScript Player API

YouTube Flash (AS3) Player API

YouTube Upload Widget

YouTube Data API (v2)

Going forward, we will be pushing updates via RSS for all of the YouTube APIs. Follow our YouTube for Developers Google+ page, and subscribe to the RSS feeds to get the latest API updates!

Cheers,
—Ibrahim Ulukaya, YouTube API Team

No WebView required, with native YouTube Player API for Android

Friday, December 21, 2012

YouTube Android Player APIpre-announced

High-quality video playback supported on Android 2.2 (Froyo) or newer

Easy integration with your Android application (no WebView required)

Fullscreen and orientation change support

Closed captions display

Support for YouTube ads

Programmatic access, similar to existing Player APIs, to most aspects of the YouTube video playback experience

Integration with the Android YouTube app using a standard set of YouTube Intents

experimentalThe Only Limit Now is Your Imagination ToSinstructionsYouTubeAndroidPlayerApi.jar4.2.16YouTubeApiServiceUtilisYouTubeApiServiceAvailableYouTubeStandalonePlayerYouTubePlayerViewYouTubePlayerFragmentFragmentsexamplePlay With These Apps

See everything on Flipboard, all your news and life’s great moments in one place. Now you can watch YouTube videos from wherever you are in Flipboard without leaving the application, providing a more integrated and seamless experience.

BuzzFeed delivers original reporting, scoops, and the hottest social content on the web. Android users can now view their favorite BuzzFeed content featuring YouTube videos in the BuzzFeed app and share with their friends.

9x9.tv enables users to discover and watch curated, topical videos that are organized into TV-like channels. Their blog describes their experience developing with the API.

SoundTracking lets people use their mobile phone or tablet to share their music moments and favorite jams with friends and family. Users can now discover and play YouTube music videos of the songs within their music timeline.

Fitness Flow by Skimble helps you get in shape with high-quality exercise videos led by professional trainers. Skimble uses YouTube to stream workout content on your Android phone and tablets.

Google Play

Flipboard

BuzzFeed

Fitness Flow by Skimble

Learn MoredocumentationplaylistYouTube for Developers'

Check Out The Sample Codecode.google.comdocumentationsupport resources-- Ross McIlroy, Anton Hansson, and Horia Ciurdar, YouTube Mobile Team

The Simpler, Yet More Powerful New YouTube Data API

Friday, December 14, 2012

Since its initial launch in 2007, the YouTube Data API has become one of Google’s most popular APIs by request volume, thanks to the awesome apps from developers like you. To help you make better integrated video experiences, you can now use the YouTube API version 3.0. The new API is easy to use thanks to rich client library support, improved tooling, reference documentation and integration with Google’s common API infrastructure. Version 3.0 only returns what you ask for and is using JSON rather than XML encoding for greater efficiency. The API introduces new core functionality including Freebase integration via topics, and universal search. If you develop social media management apps, you’ll love channel bulletin post and full subscriber list management, also new in this release. Version 3.0 of the API constitutes the API's biggest overhaul to date and we’re eager for you to try it today!
New Functionality: Topics, Universal Search, and Audience Engagement Support
Have you ever tried to search for YouTube videos only to find out that keyword search can produce ambiguous results? With the new Topics API, thanks to the power of Freebase, you can find exactly what you’re looking for by specifying Freebase topic IDs rather than search keywords.

For example, if you’re reading this post from outside of the US and would like to search for content related to football, /m/02vx4 is probably the topic ID you're after. The API's universal search feature lets you retrieve channels, playlists and videos matching the topic with just one request like this one. Find out more in our Topics API Guide.

Version 3.0 introduces better tools to engage and interact with one’s YouTube audience. Social media management apps can now help content creators communicate with their channel subscribers using buletin posts.
Efficiency, Client Libraries, Better Tooling and More!
To help you reduce your app’s bandwidth requirements version 3.0 only returns the information you ask for as specified by the “part” parameter.

While the default JSON encoding in version 3.0 is more efficient than XML in version 2.0, if parsing JSON isn’t your thing, check out the client libraries for .NET, Dart, Go, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP, Python and Ruby. The libraries use OAuth 2.0 authorization and work with the YouTube API as well as other modern Google APIs thus simplifying your application.

The familiar Google API tools such as the API console work with YouTube API version 3.0 without any extra hassles. Additionally, our API reference documentation now allows you to scroll down to the bottom of any reference page to try the API. You can also or visit the standalone API Explorer to browse a list of supported methods.
App Examples
Even though version 3.0 is still experimental, a number of exciting new apps are already using it. Let’s look at a few examples:

Showyou, an app that makes it easy to watch the Internet, integrated the Topics API to enable users to discover related videos after tapping on topics associated with the Showyou feed.

Argentina-based Interesante integrated the Topics API to determine the Freebase topic of videos being shared. Interesante used this to serve interest-based video recommendations.

FanBridge, a company specializing in growing and managing one’s fan base, recently introduced channel bulletin post functionality with scheduled posts support.

Tubular Labs, which focuses on YouTube audience development, uses subscriber list to help content creators develop a better understanding of their audiences.

Pixability, a company specializing in YouTube marketing software, was able to quickly port their Online Video Grader to the YouTube API version 3.0 thanks to the new Python client library.

Learn More
documentationthis playlistYouTube for Developers' channel

Use The Source, Luke! PythonJavaScriptTopics Explorercode.google.comRaul FurnicăVladimir VuskovicPepijn Crouzen

ClientLogin using Google Accounts

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Long-time readers might remember a blog post from a while back entitled “ClientLogin #FAIL”, in which we covered the myriad ways in which your ClientLogin authorization attempts might result in an error. Even though ClientLogin has been officially deprecated since April 2012, and even though we’ve been recommending that developers switch to OAuth 2 for longer than that, we know there are still a good number of legacy applications out there that still rely on ClientLogin.

If you are a developer of such an application, there’s another thing that you (and your users) will need to start watching out for: at some point in the future, we will start requiring that the username parameter passed to ClientLogin (i.e. what’s referred to as the Email= value in the ClientLogin request) correspond to the full email address of the Google Account that’s associated with an underlying YouTube channel. We’ve supported using Google Account email addresses with ClientLogin for many years now, ever since we started linking Google Accounts to YouTube channels, but old habits die hard, and many users still use YouTube usernames.

We haven’t yet determined a date for when we still stop supporting ClientLogin with YouTube usernames and will provide additional details when we know more about when it will take place. However, if you use ClientLogin, it’s not too early to start encouraging your application’s users to start providing their Google Account email addresses instead of their YouTube usernames when logging in. If you have the ability to update your existing application’s user interface, we recommend doing so to indicate that the username field should take a Google Account email address. If you have any online help materials or technical support for your software, update them to ensure that users know to provide their Google Account email address.

Users who log in via the YouTube.com web interface, or who go through the AuthSub, OAuth 1, or OAuth 2 web authorization flows will soon be required to use their Google Account email address instead of their YouTube username as well. This web-based transition will take place well before we deprecate YouTube usernames for ClientLogin, and it should be transparent to developers since Google controls the user interface for these flows. For more information, see this help center article.

As mentioned, we’ll have a follow-up post in coming months with more details about exactly when we’ll stop supporting YouTube usernames with ClientLogin. That post will also communicate the exact error message that ClientLogin will return when a YouTube username is used. We’d like to close with one more plea: ClientLogin is deprecated, and is technically inferior to OAuth 2 in a number of important ways. Our new Google APIs client libraries provide first-class OAuth 2 integration that developers can take advantage of in their new code, or back port to their existing code. You will be doing your users a service and making their accounts more secure by transitioning from ClientLogin to OAuth 2.
Update (June 2013): The change mentioned in this blog post is now in effect. Attempts to use ClientLogin with a YouTube username will result in HTTP 403 Forbidden responses, with Error=BadAuthentication in the response body.Cheers,—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Using WebM to power the YouTube app for Nintendo Wii

Thursday, November 15, 2012

When we began building the new YouTube app for Nintendo Wii, we wanted to make video playback smooth and beautiful. This meant squeezing the most available power from the console CPU and fitting the video decoding process within the tight bounds of available memory. After trying out several video encoding formats on Wii, we found that 360p WebM encoding performed the best. With the largest install base of current generation consoles, YouTube on Wii is the largest deployment of WebM video in the world today.

WebM is particularly well-suited to devices where available memory is limited, because of its technical approach to video encoding. VP8, the video codec in WebM, uses reference frames (called alternative reference frames, or "alt-ref") from which adjacent video frames are derived and compressed. This type of compression is commonly used in modern video encoding schemes, but VP8 uses the technique with particular efficiency, which results in a smaller memory footprint and smoother video playback on Wii.

We went one step further and performed low-level optimization of the VP8 decoder specifically tuned to the Wii’s processor. This included: using paired-single floating point operations to perform motion compensation, loop filtering, and idct; using the GPU to do color conversion and scaling; and dcbz instructions to copy buffers. This kind of optimization is available to anyone, as the VP8 code is open source under a BSD license.

We’ll keep looking into other ways we can use WebM, so stay tuned on this blog to learn more.

Fritz Koenig, Engineer, recently watched Phantogram - "Don't Move", and Matt Darby, Product Manager, recently watched “JP Auclair Street Segment.”

Upcoming HTTPS Certificate Change

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

If you’re a developer who uses the YouTube API, and if you make your requests to the API using HTTPS, there’s an upcoming change that you should be aware of. Sometime in early August 2013, Google will be changing the certificates used for establishing secure HTTPS connections to all of our servers, in what we anticipate will be a backwards-compatible manner. Still, since there are so many slight differences in HTTPS client implementations, we encourage you to test your existing code in advance of this change and to report any issues that you do encounter.
The new certificates are currently active on https://cert-test.sandbox.google.com/, and we recommend testing your HTTPS client implementation against that URL.
If you’re using HTTP instead of HTTPS to access the YouTube Data API then you also won’t be affected by the new security certificates—but you really should start using HTTPS!
This post on the Google Online Security Blog has more information about the upcoming change, which roll out in early August, 2013.
Cheers,—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Engineering and Developers Blog