Google Data » Stephanie Liu

Public Service Announcement – Upload Regression Testing

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:03:00 +0000

The team has been working to improve the API upload infrastructure behind the scenes, and the new build is up at:

http://uploads2.gdata.youtube.com

Please do regression testing on your systems and report problems in our discussion forum.

Barring any major complications, this will begin rolling out to the production uploads URL (uploads.gdata.youtube.com) in two weeks.

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

Google I/O Pass Winner!

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:26:00 +0000

Wow, there's quite a bit of creative talent out there! It was hard to select from all the posts, but the winning haiku was from lionstone:

public void youtube
extends the community
return social change

Honorable mention goes to Ron (who already bought a ticket to the conference!):

Documentation -
cut, five, seven, five, season
form situation

We'll be seeing both of them at Google I/O tomorrow -- if you're coming as well, come say 'hi' to the team at Office Hours, at the Sandbox, and in our two sessions. If you can't make it, watch the Twitter stream during the conference and the videos that will be posted afterwards.

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

Google I/O Pass

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:50:00 +0000

Google I/O, our largest developer conference in San Francisco, CA, is just around the corner, and we'd love to see more YouTube developers there. We'll have two formal sessions, as well as office hours and lots of demos at the Developer Sandbox.

Kuan, our Product Manager, will be giving a session about writing great, monetizable apps, and Jeff Fisher and Jochen Hartmann will be giving a session on the new social feeds.

Check out the rest of the great sessions and the schedule.

We have one free pass ($400 value) to give away, so if you'll be in the area, tell us why you want to go in this forum thread. We'll pick the worthiest person by the end of the week (hint: Jeff really likes Haikus :).

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

Latest Release Notes: Playlist Search, Time, and More

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:51:00 +0000

Enjoy a few new tidbits in the latest release.

Search for playlists

Yup, the same way you can search for videos and channels , you can now use the API to search for playlists:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/snippets?q=soccer&v=2

The query above will return a list of playlist snippets that match the query 'soccer'. Searching in playlists is an excellent way to find YouTube videos about a specific point of interest (e.g. dancing, cooking, sports etc.).

Time filtering for video search

You can now restrict the video search result to a specific time interval (today, this_week, this_month, all_time):

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=soccer&time=today&v=2

The default is 'all_time'.

More results

You can now request past the 100th video in a playlist and past the 200th video in a favorite list. Additionally, you can now get 1000 videos in a search feed instead of 999! Enjoy that last video, guys.

As always, post in the forum if you have any feedback or questions!

Posted by Daniel Danciu, Software Engineer

Latest .NET SDK Released! LINQ & New Social Notifier Sample

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:58:00 +0000

Posted by Frank Mantek, Google Data APIs Team

The new .NET SDK is released and available for download here:

http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/downloads/list

There's now updated support for YouTube V2 and a new vertical object model that allows you to use local LINQ queries. Please go through the Google.YouTube namespaces and see what's new there. We have some documentation for it here:

http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/clients/cs/docs/AdditionalContent/YouTubeLinqExamples.html

Last, but not least, there is the Notifier for YouTube sample application, which showcases the activity feeds YouTube is exposing. You can subscribe to events from your friends and other YouTube users and get notified whenever they leave their marks in the YouTube universe. The sample is also available as a separate download.

The complete release notes can be found here:

http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/docs/RELEASE_NOTES.HTML

which also lists all the bugs that were fixed in this release. Report new ones here:

http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/issues/list

YouTube API Outgrows Shy Adolescence, Now Social

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

YouTube has been getting more social lately, using activity feeds to make it easier to find cool videos and channels that your YouTube friends are favoriting, rating, subscribing to, etc. But what if all your friends aren't on YouTube, but rather on social network / site XYZ?

Well, my friends, the API has come out of its awkward teenage years, and now has more sophisticated social skills to help. Activities like favoriting, uploading, commenting, and more can now be integrated into the social context of your choice. Check out the docs for the new user activity feed and friend activity feed.

Before you ask, the user activity feed is fully customizable by the user, and the corresponding feed through the API respects all privacy settings. So users still have full control over what they make available in their recent activity feed.

We think some cool apps can be made with these feeds -- like the obvious social network / feed aggregator integrations, to notification apps, to novel data views. We can't wait to see what you guys make!

Get started by perusing the docs and playing with the sample. Besides the protocol guide, we've also updated the Java and PHP guides with helpful snippets. An activity viewer sample written in PHP and its source code is also available for you to play with.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or feedback in the forum.

PS. If you want to socialize with the team in person, come to Google I/O, where we'll be giving a session on "Going social with the YouTube APIs"!

Next IRC Office Hours: Wednesday, Feb. 4th, 1:00 – 3:00pm PST

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:55:00 +0000

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

Last week, we had a grand ol' time troubleshooting some issues, chatting about the player, making some new friends, and salivating over a Dark Chocolate Bacon Cupcakes recipe. So, we'll be holding office hours again next week, same bat time, same bat channel.

Where: irc.freenode.net#youtube-api
When: Wednesday, February 4th, 1:00 - 3:00 pm PST
Who: Look for xirzec, stephliu, and jh_youtube

Let us know if you'd prefer a different time for future office hours, or just post your questions in our discussion forum.

Inaugural IRC Office Hours: Wed, Jan. 21st, 1-3pm PST

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:11:00 +0000

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

Starting next week, we'll be hosting live office hours on IRC (irc.freenode.net channel #youtube-api). Come ask your questions, give feedback, gossip about the latest Atom Pub news, share best practices, or just hang out.

Where: irc.freenode.net#youtube-api
When: Wednesday, January 21st, 1:00 - 3:00 pm PST
Who: Look for xirzec, stephliu, and jh_youtube, we'll be the cool kids in the back :)

If you can't make it, no worries, you can still post, as always, in the discussion forum. You can also let us know what times would work better for you in the future. See you there!

UPDATE: Small change. We'll be hosting hours 1-3 PST, not PDT :) Also, for those of you who don't have IRC clients installed, you may want to use a web-based client like mibbit.com. Choose "Freenode" as the server, pick a nickname, and use #youtube-api as the channel.

YouTube Developer Happiness Survey

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:53:00 +0000

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

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:00:00 +0000

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

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:39:00 +0000

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++.

Try Before You Buy

Stephanie Liu — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:12:00 +0000

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.

YouTube Geo Search + Gears Geolocation = Find Flix Near You!

Stephanie Liu — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:22:00 +0000

Posted by Austin Chau, Google Data APIs Team

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.

YouTube Geo + Gears

Spotlight on: WatchToLearnChinese.com

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:59:00 +0000

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.

Thanks, Philipp! Check out the docs for more info about the Chromeless Player, the the JavaScript Player API, and the Data API.

YouTube API Support in Drupal

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:18:00 +0000

Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

Before coming to Google, I spent a good amount of time working with Drupal, the popular, open-source content management platform written in PHP. So when I heard that Brad Bowman of aten design group was working on the integration with the YouTube Data API, I was really excited.

Drupal is easily extended via third-party modules that interact both with the core Drupal API and with other third-party modules. Brad's youtube_api module is more of a low-level infrastructure component that allows other modules to interact with the YouTube Data API.

By integrating this module into your site, you can easily perform YouTube uploads in your own code by adding calls like this:

// Build an XML string with the correct video meta-data
$xml_string = youtube_api_create_xml('xml_tester', $xml);

// Use the YouTube API module to perform the video upload
$result = youtube_api_video_upload($xml_string,
  $node->files['upload_0']->filepath, $node->files['upload_0']->filename);

The module currently works for Drupal 5 and a live version of it can be seen at
icitizenforum.com. A Drupal 6 release is planned for the near future.

PHP: Check Yourself, Before You Wreck Yourself

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:43:00 +0000

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:

PHP has been compiled with the correct extensions
the Zend Framework is installed and accessible
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

Tips From the Team

Stephanie Liu — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:21:00 +0000

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 Tips Blog was created! For example, Jochen has a few tips on how to get the next and prev links using SimpleXML, how to use the PHP Client Library through a proxy, and adding multiple video responses.

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

If you only want PHP tips for YouTube, you can further filter the labels:
http://gdatatips.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/youtube/php

Or, of course, you can subscribe to the whole thing by just using the base feed:
http://gdatatips.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/

Happy coding!

.NET Client Library Learns to Multitask

Stephanie Liu — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:29:00 +0000

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.

Spotlight on: One True Media

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:30:00 +0000

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.

Latest Features (9/4/2008)

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:43:00 +0000

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 the start 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.

Feed for new videos from your subscriptions
You can now get a feed of videos from a user's subscriptions. Closing out issue 366. To see what lonelygirl15 is watching, use:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/lonelygirl15/newsubscriptionvideos

New standard feeds for categories
You can now get standard feeds for the different categories -- these should more or less correspond with the browse pages. For example, for top rated videos in Comedy:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/top_rated_Comedy ?time=today and http://www.youtube.com/browse?c=23&l=&b=0

You can also get localized feeds. For example, the top rated Comedy videos today in Germany:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/de/top_rated_Comedy ?time=today

See the docs for more info.

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.

A few other tidbits:

you can now sort the comments feed in ascending order: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/6d26GGXkzR0/comments?sortorder=ascending
superfluous min/max for adding a rating to a video is no longer required
spelling suggestion links return the suggested phrase in the 'title' attribute now, making it easier to parse out
media:rating 2 is considered age-restricted in certain countries. See docs for more details.

Let us know if you have any questions over in the discussion forum.

The Cake is Not a Lie: Happy Birthday, YouTube API!

Stephanie Liu — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:15:00 +0000

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

It's hard to believe, but it's already been one year since the launch of the YouTube Data API. A

big thank you to everyone who's asked questions, filed bugs, and of course, built amazing apps on top of our APIs. Keep 'em coming!

We celebrated today with a sweet XML ice cream cake. Check out our video below.

Here's to another great year!

YouTube for Slackers

Stephanie Liu — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:27:00 +0000

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 Bar and 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.)

PHP Developer’s Guide Updated

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:09:00 +0000

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.

Get your .NET on

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:07:00 +0000

Posted by Jeff Fisher, YouTube APIs & Tools Team

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.

Feedback Time

Stephanie Liu — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:14:00 +0000

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.

Latest Release Notes

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:21:00 +0000

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:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?location=

You'll notice that all results returned by the api now have a location returned in the georss:where tag:

  <gml:Point>
     <gml:pos>40.44263458251953 -79.94313049316406</gml:pos>
  </gml:Point>
</georss:where>

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.

New Standard Feed: Most Popular

There's a new standard feed out there:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/most_popular

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:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/de/most_popular

** 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.

Python client library support for the YouTube API

Stephanie Liu — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:26:00 +0000

Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

I'd like the announce the release of the Python client library extensions for YouTube, as well as the developer's guide and two sample applications.

The samples use the Python client library with Google App Engine to demonstrate how to perform a parametrized search query and browser-based uploads.They are improved versions of the samples that Stephanie and I built for our Code Lab at Google I/O last month.

Happy coding! As always, if you have questions or comments, share them with us in our developer forum.

Registrations Open for "Powered By YouTube"

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:34:00 +0000

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

Reserve your spot and register here:
http://www.youtube.com/poweredbyyoutube

Already have questions, comments, or session suggestions? Let us know in the forum. Hope to see you here next month!

Spotlight on: TimeTube

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:15:00 +0000

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.

Google I/O Wrapup

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:54:00 +0000

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,

Michael Geary wrote AnnoTube, a jQuery plugin that uses the JavaScript Player API to synchronize related web pages or HTML to the video.
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.

The code project where all the materials live:
http://code.google.com/p/hello-youtube

The wiki that goes through the exercises during the session:
http://code.google.com/p/hello-youtube/wiki/Codelab

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:

We feel like I/O was a great success, so thanks to everyone who came out to the sessions, talked to us at the booth, and shared your enthusiasm about YouTube with us. It's always great to meet you guys in person! If you couldn't make it this year, check out one of the free Google Developer Days that are being held around the world later this year.

Visit the Team at Google I/O

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:54:00 +0000

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!

Developer Highlights: Tower of Babel Roundup

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:32:00 +0000

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:

Part 1: MyTube from the ground up
Part 2: MyTube - Installing the image wall
Part 3: MyTube - now with moving images

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.

Shane Vitarana's Ruby wrapper has been updated to handle the Google Data feeds. Read the short introduction in his blog.

The Google Data .NET Client Library doesn't have YouTube-specific support yet, but Karsten Januszewski has written a sample and wrapper to help ease the parsing pain in the meantime.

If you've written a cool application, tutorial, or extension using the YouTube APIs, we'd love to see it! Share it with everyone over in the forum.

Something to write home about

Stephanie Liu — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:34:00 +0000

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 these five feature requests in the issue tracker.)

The Java client library and the PHP client library (in the Zend Framework 1.50RC2 release) have both been updated, as well as the respective developer guides.

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 internationalized feeds in the 18 domains that YouTube supports.

Videos that are top rated in France right now:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/fr/top_rated

The most relevant videos about bicycles (vélos) in French:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?vq=vélos&orderby=relevance_lang_fr

Player APIs and Tools

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.

Cheers,

Stephanie Liu, on behalf of the whole team

Important Info That Could Affect You!

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 03:20:00 +0000

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.

Get started by looking at our API documentation.

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).

http://gdata.youtube.com/crossdomain.xml

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.

Cheers,

Steph

YouTube support added to PHP Client Library

Stephanie Liu — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:44:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

We've just released support for YouTube (as well as DocList and Picasa) in our PHP Client Library!

New sample applications have been released along with the extensions. See the video below for demos (look for our very own Ryan Boyd):

YouTube's sample app also comes with a Developer's Guide that walks through the code and highlights important operations.

Check out the full blog post over at the Google Data blog for more details.

Cheers,

Steph

Latest Changes to the API

Stephanie Liu — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 01:08:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

We recently pushed out a few notable changes -- take a look! If you notice anything weird, please bring it up in our discussion forum.

Projections. You can now use the /api projection to get a feed without all the HTML markup, making it faster and lighter weight for you to use. A more feed-reader friendly version can be accessed with the /base projection. Read about it more here: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/reference.html#Projection

Spelling Suggestions. If we have a better suggestion for your 'vq' query, it will appear like this: (Link to feature request.)

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?vq=flowar


      rel="http://schemas.google.com/g/2006#spellcorrection" 
    type="application/atom+xml" 
    href="http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?start-index=1&max-results=25&vq=flower&oi=spell&spell=1"/>
...

geoRSS information. You'll now notice geoRSS information returned in video feeds if it's available. Format is the same as other GData APIs with lat/long information like Picasa. (Link to feature request.)


  
    28.61345863342285 -82.6171875

Searching within a specific area and filtering by videos with geoRSS information is not available yet. This functionality is planned -- you can follow it in our issue tracker. Star the issue to receive updates.

Notable bug fixes:

&format=5 restrict now works. This is useful for only returning embeddable videos; format 5 being the embed SWF. (Link to issue.)

The user subscription feed now pages past 20. (Link to issue.)

Cheers,

Steph

New YouTube API Released into the Wild!

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 23:34:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

The new GData YouTube API is here! If you remember my previous post, we've been working on rewriting the API using the Google data protocol to be more scalable and reliable. We're now ready to release the read-only feeds for you to play with.

You'll be able to do all the things you could with the old API (search through videos, get user information, and list playlists). On top of that, we've added more flexibility with filtering, querying, and alternative outputs (e.g. if you want output in JSON). Brand new feeds include video responses, full comments list, and related videos.

Additionally, the Google data client libraries are now at your disposal. The Java client library even has YouTube-specific extensions, and you can check out the Java developer guide for sample code and explanations. More documentation in different languages is on the way

This new API also fulfills many of the feature requests you've been asking for,
e.g. you can now filter search results by upload date, view count, and rating as well as relevance. Visit the wiki for a full list of completed requests.

To get a full picture of what's new, read up on the docs at our new home on
code.google.com. The reference guide, developers guide, and migration guide are great reads. (Not as engaging as Harry Potter 7, but really, what is?)

What will happen to the Legacy API?

The old REST/XML-RPC API will continue to work for at least a year - through
August 30th, 2008. After that, its existence is not guaranteed. If your website or app is using the Legacy API, we recommend switching sooner rather than later. The migration guide will help you through the process.

What's next?

We hear you - we know that upload and other write capabilities are wanted by the community. These features are what we're focusing on next.

We've also tried to anticipate other common questions in our new Knowledge Base.

As always, join the discussion forum to give feedback and ask questions I haven't addressed here. We're excited to see what you can build!

Cheers,

Steph

The Future

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 04:56:00 +0000

Hi everyone!

Last Thursday at the Google Developer Day, we announced that the next iteration of the API will be based on the Google data ("GData") standard! We hope to release read feeds later this summer. As the date gets closer, we'll be posting announcements and documentation here, on the developer homepage, and the forums. Check out our presentation on, of course, YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEUDvEd31F8

Why GData?

- Better scalability/stability/flexibility
- Standardizing on an existing framework - easier to mash up with other GData APIs
- Setting us up for write feeds later in the year by using the authentication models
- Developers can leverage GData resources, such as client libraries and developer guides

What will happen to the old API?

The existing API will continue to be available for the foreseeable future, but all new features will be built into the GData API. Plenty of notice will be given before the current API goes anywhere.

What do I do now?

Give us feedback! This is your chance to let us know what you want in a YouTube API. The team goes through the API Feature Request wiki regularly, so sign up for our forum (if you haven't already), and get involved!

We hope that the new API will improve the developer experience, and make it even easier to add YouTube content into your project.

Cheers,

Steph

Broadcasting Ourselves

Stephanie Liu — Tue, 15 May 2007 18:52:00 +0000

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the official blog for the YouTube API. All important announcements regarding the API will be posted here, so please subscribe to our RSS feed to stay in the loop.

For any developers new to the API, I encourage you to visit the YouTube developer homepage. There, you'll be able to sign up and gain access to YouTube's search results, video details, user details and more for your application or website. We hope the developer community will help us bring YouTube videos to even more people on the web!

To join this growing community, check out our developer forum where you can post questions, answer questions, share your projects, and give feedback. We've been busy working on enhancements to the API, and appreciate all the feedback we've gotten from the folks speaking up there.

Happy coding,

Stephanie