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A Chrome Extension for YouTube Activity Feeds

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Slave Jovanovski, an engineer at YouTube, has put together a Google Chrome extension that should be of interest to the YouTube API community. It’s called YouTube Feed, and after installing and authenticating with your YouTube account, it automatically will fetch your YouTube social activity stream (both subscriptions and friends’ actions) while you use Google Chrome. When a new event, like a YouTube friend uploading or commenting on a video, takes place, the extension will notify you and provide details on the activity, as well as links to view the actual video. You have control over which types of activities you’d like to be notified about, as well as how frequently you’d like the extension to check for updates.

While you’ll hopefully find the extension useful on its own merits, the fact that the source code has been released as part of an open source project means that the extension’s code can serve as inspiration (or a jumping off point) for writing your own JavaScript code that interacts with the YouTube API. Curious as to how to use OAuth to authenticate YouTube accounts from a Chrome Extension? Or request JSON data with a JavaScript callback? The answers await you in the source code!

Cheers,
–Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Accelerating YouTube Playback

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The YouTube Players team’s goal is to make sure that watching videos online is as enjoyable an experience as possible. As a viewer, maximizing enjoyment usually involves some tradeoffs: sure, you can watch a 1080p high definition version of the newest movie trailer, but that might mean choppy playback as your computer strains to keep up with the more demanding processing required. We wanted to let you know about some changes we’re making to help minimize those tradeoffs, so that you can watch smoother, higher-quality video from your existing devices.

Adobe’s recently announced Flash Player 10.2 release supports a new, more efficient video display mechanism known as the Stage Video API. The full details of how and why Stage Video speeds up video display can be found in Adobe’s technical documentation. The Players Team will be gradually experimenting with Stage Video playbacks on YouTube.com in the coming weeks, but as a developer using the ActionScript 3 Player APIs, you can enable Stage Video playback for your embedded video right away; simply add the wmode=direct parameter to the player URL that you’re using to reference the YouTube video. You’ll need the Flash Player 10.2 installed to take advantage of the accelerated playback, but playbacks will work for users with older Flash Player versions as well.

The Players Team knows that Stage Video for Flash playbacks is just one path to take toward improving video playback performance across the web. For example, YouTube playbacks using the new <iframe> embeds will automatically benefit as more and more (and more) modern browsers add hardware acceleration for the native HTML5 <video> element.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, on behalf of the YouTube Players team
(Updated 2011-02-09 to reflect the production release of Flash Player 10.2.)

More Channels to Feed On

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The YouTube API’s standard feeds are a great way to expose your users to the best of what YouTube has to offer. To compliment the existing standard video feeds, which contain lists of individual videos that meet certain criteria (the top rated videos in the United States for the current day, for instance), we’re happy to introduce a new set of standard channel feeds.
While standard video feeds contain lists of videos, standard channel feeds contain lists of channels, or user accounts. The two types of standard channel feeds are most_viewed and most_subscribed, and just like with video feeds you can narrow down your results even further with time, region, and category or user type parameters. For example, the URL for requesting the most viewed channels with videos related to music in Great Britain for the past week is http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/channelstandardfeeds/GB/most_viewed/-/Music?v=2&time=this_week. Each entry in a standard channel feed provides detailed information about a specific YouTube channel, including a element with info on how many comments, videos, and views that channel has received.

Once you have these lists of channels, a natural next step would be to allow your logged-in users to subscribe to a given channel or view a list of videos uploaded in that channel.

Standard channel feeds are only available in version 2 of the YouTube API, which will soon be the default version in the production environment. In the meantime, be sure to explicitly specify that you want to use version 2 when making your YouTube API requests.

Cheers,
Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Update to the ClientLogin URL

Thursday, November 4, 2010

We want to let the developer community know about a change to the officially supported URL for YouTube API ClientLogin requests. Previously, developers who wanted to obtain authentication credentials via a username and password had to send their ClientLogin request to https://www.google.com/youtube/accounts/ClientLogin. The new URL that we encourage all developers to use is https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin. This new URL has been functional for a while, and is the same URL that other Google APIs use for ClientLogin requests. Switching YouTube API ClientLogin traffic to the standard URL ensures that developers across all of Google’s APIs will see standard behavior when logging users in.

All of the details regarding this switch as well as best practices for performing ClientLogin requests can be found in our YouTube API documentation. There is one specific change in behavior that is worth calling out: responses from the new ClientLogin URL will not include the YouTube username of the authenticated user, which the old URL’s responses did provide. We encourage developers to take advantage of the username default when constructing YouTube API request URLs, which always refers to the currently logged in user.

We have no immediate plans to disable the old ClientLogin URL, but we do encourage developers to update their code at their earliest convenience to point to the new URL. We will post again with further details if and when the legacy URL is turned off.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

The ActionScript 2 Chromeless Player and Monetized Videos

Monday, October 25, 2010

The ActionScript 3 Player APIs, both in the chromeless and embedded variety, have been available for use since last October. When we released the ActionScript 3 APIs, we announced the deprecation of the ActionScript 2 equivalents. As per our deprecation policy, we will keep the ActionScript 2 Player APIs running through October of 2012; however, we wanted to announce a change in the videos available for playback that will affect those still using the ActionScript 2 chromeless player.

As of early January, 2011, some videos that YouTube and our content partners would like to monetize will not be playable using the ActionScript 2 chromeless player because it does not have the ability to show ads. If you attempt to play back such a video, an onError event will be fired, as documented in the ActionScript 2 Player APIs reference guide. As a developer, you can handle this event and play an alternate video, or display an explanatory message to your users.

Please note that this change only affects playback in the ActionScript 2 chromeless player. If you are using the ActionScript 2 embedded player (i.e. the official YouTube player with built-in controls) or if you’ve already upgraded to one of the ActionScript 3 players, you can continue to play the same video content you can play today. Also note that you might be using the the ActionScript 2 chromeless player indirectly if you’re using a third-party custom video player to play back YouTube content. Please reach out to the provider of your custom video player if you’re not sure whether this change will affect you.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

PubSubHubbub for YouTube Activities

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Update (February 2012): We're happy to report that PubSubHubbub functionality for YouTube feeds has been restored for the uploads, subscriptions, and favorites feed. When subscribing to a feed URL, be sure that the only URL parameter you include is v=2, e.g. http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/GoogleDevelopers/uploads?v=2

Update (November 2011): As mentioned below, PubSubHubbub for YouTube feeds is currently inactive. The engineering team is investigating options for restoring functionality; more info will be posted following those investigations.

Update (October 2011): Unfortunately, we no longer support subscribing to YouTube user events via PubSubHubbub. We suggest using the Simple Update Protocol as an alternative.

PubSubHubbub, for those not in the know, is a server-to-server protocol for notifying interested parties of events they’re interested in. Notifications are pushed out to subscribers via HTTP web hooks, which offers efficiencies over polling-based solutions. With PubSubHubbub, your server finds out about events in near real-time, without having to determine the optimal polling interval or repeatedly fetch individual activity feeds that haven’t changed.

We’re happy to announce that it’s now possible to subscribe to three types of YouTube user events via PubSubHubbub: video uploads, new subscriptions, and video favorites. The subscription requests need to be made on a per-user basis, so you will only receive updates for specific users that you’re interested in.Your code can look for our PubSubHubbub hub address in the href attribute of the top-level <link rel='hub'> element in uploads, subscriptions, and favorites feeds. For example, the feed http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/GoogleDevelopers/uploads?v=2 exposes the hub address in the <link rel='hub' href='http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com'/> element.

More details on the PubSubHubbub can be found in the specification document. If you’d like your server to receive YouTube user event updates via PubSubHubbub, this list of libraries is a good place to start.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team, in conjunction with the PubSubHubbub Team

Resources for Mobile Development with YouTube

Friday, September 24, 2010

The importance of mobile applications in our day-to-day lives continues to grow. We can now do so many things with our phones that would have been impossible not too long ago. While watching videos on mobile devices has been popular for quite some time, mobile uploads to YouTube grew by 160% last year. Mobile application developers can take advantage of this growth by incorporating different types of functionality. Many interesting YouTube projects combine video capture, uploading, sharing and playback, with application logic executing both on the mobile device and in the cloud. With that in mind, we've compiled this article to help developers quickly get up to speed on what is involved in building one, please let us know what you think!Update:article

Thanks,-Jarek Wilkiewicz, YouTube API Team

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