Engineering and Developers Blog
What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube
YouTube Developer Happiness Survey
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
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.
YouTube Google Desktop Gadget
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
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.
YouTube Integration in Games
Monday, December 1, 2008
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.
I expect more games to follow in the footsteps of
Spore's Creature Creator
,
PixelJunk Eden
, and
Mainichi Issho
, which already include YouTube support. The code that comes with my article on Gamasutra.com [
http://www.gamasutra.com/
view/feature/3855/share_your_
experience_youtube_.php
] should provide an excellent start if you want to access YouTube from a game or application written in C/C++.
Application Gallery Launched - Submit Your Own!
Monday, November 24, 2008
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.
Try Before You Buy
Monday, November 17, 2008
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.
Check it out:
http://gdata.youtube.com/demo/index.html
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
.
A Mandate for Change
Thursday, November 13, 2008
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.
All The World's A Stage
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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:
http://groups.google.com/group/youtube-api
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