Google Data » Youtube API

Dude, are you still on YouTube API v2?

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 22:51:00 +0000

Your YouTube integration is important; but, do you know if you are still on the soon-to-be-retired v2 API or taking advantage of many new features that the new Data API v3 offers, like “video ratings,” “in-video promotions” and “channel sections?”

Retirement plan

In March 2014, we announced that the v2 API would be retired in April 20, 2015, and would be shut down soon thereafter. To help you with your migration, we launched the migration guide in September. Now, we’d like to provide you with more details on the plan to retire v2.

To make sure that you’ve migrated everything over before fully shutting off the v2 API, we’ll perform the first of what we call “blackout tests” for the v2 API in the coming weeks, where we’ll shut down the v2 API for a limited period of time. The blackout tests, which will take place on different days of the week and at varying times of day, are meant to help you better understand the impact the retirement will have on your applications and users.

Most of the v2 requests during the blackout window will be responded to with a HTTP 410 Gone. If you want to test your application’s reaction to this response, point it at eol.gdata.youtube.com instead of gdata.youtube.com.

How you can migrate

Check out the frequently asked questions and migration guide for the most up-to-date instructions on how to update specific features to use the new API. The guide now lists all of the v2 API functionality that is being deprecated and won't be offered in the v3 API. It also identifies a couple of features that we're migrating but still working on, like “captions” and “comments”. And, finally, it includes updated instructions for a few newly migrated features, like “browser-based uploading” and “language relevant search”.

Once you’re done with that, join the rest of the folks who’ve migrated, kick back and enjoy this.

- Ibrahim Ulukaya, and the YouTube for Developers team

WatchMe live stream!

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 15:10:00 +0000

With the new YouTube WatchMe for Android project, you can easily integrate YouTube Live Streaming into your Android app. YouTube WatchMe brings your app the same live broadcasting capabilities that you've seen in great apps like Live on YouTube – by Xperia™ and Re – by HTC.

YouTube WatchMe for Android is an open-source project that uses the YouTube Data API v3, YouTube Live Streaming API, Google Play Services and Plus API. You can customize it for your app, and you can also contribute to the project by filing merge requests for new features or submitting bug reports.

How to start using the app

Sync the Github repo
In your Google Developer Console,

Enable the Youtube Data API v3 and Google+ API.
Create a client ID for Android, using your SHA1 and package name.

Include cross-platform compiled streaming libraries.

Either

libffmpeg.so under src/main/jniLibs/armeabi,

another streaming library with modifying VideoStreamingInterface

Main Activity

Live Streaming Activity

This App is still experimental, so stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

Cheers,

—Ibrahim Ulukaya, and the YouTube API Team

Have you migrated to Data API v3 yet?

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 17:49:00 +0000

If you’re already using or migrated to the YouTube Data API v3, you can stop reading and go watch this instead.

If you haven’t yet migrated from the previous API version (v2), we wanted to remind you it will be unsupported as of April 20, 2015, and shut down soon thereafter. To make it fast and easy for you to migrate, check out the new Migration Guide. It’ll help you identify the v3 API methods and parameters that correspond to the functionality that you've been using in the v2 API. It also points out new features that the v3 API supports.

The guide also lists functionality that is yet to be migrated as well as v2 features that will or might be deprecated, so you can check any feature your current app may be using and share feedback with us.

Once you’re done with that, join the rest of the folks who’ve migrated, kick back and enjoy this.

- Ibrahim Ulukaya, Andy Diamondstein and the YouTube for Developers team

Find videos uploaded from any location with the YouTube Data API v3

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 18:03:00 +0000

When news breaks, it's critical to have immediate, unfiltered access to information about the unfolding developments. During events like the Ukrainian protests and the Arab Spring, people are uploading firsthand, breaking news stories to YouTube. The YouTube Data API (v3) makes it easier to find those videos by supporting the ability to search for videos within a given radius of specified latitude/longitude coordinates. By using this feature in conjunction with the specific Freebase topic filter and upload date with time, you can discover up-to-the-minute breaking news material from people witnessing important world events.

To see an example, check out this web app that uses the new YouTube location search feature and Google Maps APIs. The app is used by news agencies to find legitimate footage and allows them to filter videos based on location, keywords, and upload time.

To search for geotagged videos, set the latitude and longitude to specify the center of a circular geographic area to be searched and the location radius to define the size of the circle. The radius can be in meters, kilometers or miles with a max size of 1000 KM.

Don’t have the latitude and longitude? Not a problem. The Google Maps API can geo-code search terms (e.g., “Boston”) and return the appropriate geographic coordinates. The Google Maps API also lets you create interactive maps to plot the results of the search. For your convenience, we’re publishing the code as open source for all to use.

Vladimir Vuskovic, Stephen Nicholls and the YouTube for Developers team.

Test drive the YouTube APIs

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Fri, 09 May 2014 21:08:00 +0000

Since the launch of the new YouTube for Developers site, you’ve been able to access API resources, see the showcase apps and hear the stories of successful YouTube Developers. With today’s addition of four new demos, you’ll be able to play with the APIs and find use cases you can easily adapt into your own application.

Upload Widget

The Upload Widget demo uses the YouTube Data API, resumable uploads, YouTube Upload Widget, and the YouTube iFrame Player API. Inspired by globalfeed.org, it lets visitors upload videos in which they answer a few questions. On the first page, users can also see answers uploaded by others.

Upload Widget

Topic Explorer

Via the Freebase API and the YouTube Data API, the Topic Explorer helps visitors find videos related to queries using the Google Knowledge Graph. After the initial query search on Freebase, users can select the exact entity on the Google Knowledge Graph and find videos related to the entity rather than to the simple search term. They can then watch these videos in a player that uses the YouTube iFrame API.

Topic Explorer

Analytics

By using the YouTube Analytics API, viewers can see the geographic distribution of viewers for Google Developer videos during Google I/O 2013. They can slide through different dates to change the statistics. They can also hover over continents to find the exact viewcounts and the most popular videos for that continent for the selected date.

Analytics

Live Widget

With the power of the YouTube Live Streaming API and the YouTube Data API, visitors can see the most popular YouTube live streams right now. They can click the titles of streams to watch them in a player, which uses the YouTube iFrame API, or simply click one of the empty time slots in the last row to schedule their own broadcasts in the calendar.

Live Widget

Stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

—Ibrahim Ulukaya, Danny Reed, Corrie Appelbaum and the YouTube for Developers team

Introducing YouTube developer stories

Amanda Surya — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 05:33:00 +0000

Over the years, we have seen many amazing applications built using the YouTube APIs. These applications span different verticals and extend YouTube to a broader audience. We invited four developers to share their stories and give you inspiration for your work.

Fullscreen

Fullscreen helps creators and brands supercharge their online presence by building tools on top of YouTube data.

Tubular Labs

A great video is nothing without an audience. Tubular helps YouTube creators and marketers grow their audience and take them to the next level.

Capella Systems

Using the power of YouTube, Capella builds live streaming software that makes broadcasting a breeze.

Kamcord

Kamcord helps mobile gamers capture their favorite moments and share them with the world via YouTube.

Stay tuned for more YouTube developer stories in the future, visit YouTube.com/developers to learn more about YouTube APIs and start your own story.

-Amanda Surya and the YouTube for Developers team

Committing to the YouTube Data API v3

Jeffrey Posnick — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 21:52:00 +0000

Since the YouTube Data API v3 launch in 2012, many of you have used the v3 API to create integrations like Next Big Sound and Interesante.

The YouTube Data API v3 is now on the list of APIs identified in our deprecation policy, which means we will notify developers a year in advance before deprecating v3. Note, however, that some specific v3 features are excluded from this notice requirement. You can find the list here. As a reminder, v3 gives you the ability to get information about Freebase topics associated with the videos, more search features, improved client libraries support and much more.

To focus on improving v3, it’s time to say goodbye to our old friend, v2. In keeping with deprecation policy, most API functionality will remain available for use until April 20, 2015, so you have more than a year to move to the new API. See the deprecation policy in the Terms of Service for more details.

While v3 offers the majority of v2 functionality, there are currently a couple of tasks that can only be done with the older API. Specifically, applications that manage captions or that work with video comments still need to use the v2 API until modern equivalents are available. Our goal is to provide similar functionality well before the April 2015 shut-off date—please subscribe to this blog, the YouTube Data API v3 revision history page, or follow +YouTubeDev on Google+ to keep up-to-date.

If you’re a v2 developer who’s looking for help migrating to v3, the best place to start is with our documentation and FAQs. We've also made several videos that explain v3 concepts, such as registering for API access and handling authorization with OAuth 2.0.

Cheers,

—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Making stories with social media and YouTube videos

Jeffrey Posnick — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 15:18:00 +0000

By Xavier Damman, co-founder of Storify

(Cross-posted from the Google Code blog, where the post is part of Who's at Google I/O, a series of guest blog posts written by developers who are appearing in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O.)

Storify is part of the Google I/O Sandbox. Please come say hi to find out more about how you can leverage our APIs so your users can remix your content to create stories to share on social networks.

Storify provides a super simple drag and drop user experience to create stories using elements from the web: tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook updates, SlideShare presentations, audioboo files, and so on (see Storify in action here). This post explains how we incorporate videos in Storify using YouTube Data API and Player API. All the code snippets are in JavaScript. In fact, our full stack is in JavaScript: we use NodeJS and MongoDB which we think is an über cool mix.

The source of the source

To create a Storify source, we need to be able to get a feed of results using JSONp (basically JSON with a callback function so that you can do cross domain calls; from the YouTube API perspective this is the JSON-C format). For YouTube, the main search API endpoint looks like this:

request: function(formdata) {
   return {
      'url' : 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos',
      'params': {
         'v'  : 2,
         'max-results' : 20,
         'alt'  : 'jsonc',
         'q'  : formdata.keywords
       }
    };
  }

This function is called when the user clicks Submit in the search tab of the YouTube source in the Storify Editor. The main controller executes the request and sends the JSON result to the results method, which returns an array of normalized results:

results: function(json) {
 
  if (json.data && json.data.totalItems && json.data.totalItems == 0) {
    throw "No results found";
    }
  
  var videos = json.data.items;
  var results_array = [];

  for (var i = 0; i < videos.length; i++) {
        var normalizedResult = {
           permalink   : 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v='+videos[i].id,
           source  : 'youtube',
           elementClass : 'video',
           metadata  : videos[i],
           thumbnail   : videos[i].thumbnail.sqDefault,
           title: videos[i].title,
           description  : videos[i].description.substr(0,140),
           author: {username: videos[i].uploader },
           created_at  : videos[i].uploaded,
           oembed: {html: ''
           }};
     
           results_array.push(normalizedResult);
  }
  return results_array;
}

Thanks to this normalized representation of a story element – in this case, it’s a video object – we can build an object-oriented story as the user drags and drops any of these elements. This technique has multiple benefits: we maintain attribution to the original content creator, and we can track the content as it spreads across the web (how many times it has been seen and from where).

The story element also provides the oEmbed HTML code. This is used to render the video embed when the video is added to the story. For that purpose we use the YouTube Player API with their new iframe embed.

Story.json

We have a very simple way to get any data out of our platform: just append .json to any storify.com URL and you get the JSON representation of the content of that page.

For example:

http://storify.com/latest.json?topic=googleio returns the latest stories with the tag #googleio
http://storify.com/xdamman.json returns the user object and the user’s latest stories.
http://storify.com/xdamman/googleio.json returns the story object of the story “GoogleIO” of xdamman. You can use this to easily filter the elements of the story to retrieve only the YouTube videos of a given story and create a fancy HTML5 visualization (see the slideshow or this version). You can see some open source examples at http://github.com/storify/templates.

Add the Storify Editor to your site

The Storify Editor can be called in an iframe. You just need to provide a callback parameter, like this: http://storify.com/story/new?callback=yoursiteurlcallback. The user will be asked to authenticate with Twitter and then will be able to create a new story. Once the user is done and hits “Publish”, we call you back, passing you the permalink of the new story created:
yoursiteurlcallback?permalink=storyPermalink.

You can then either fetch the JSON of the story by appending “.json” to the storyPermalink or you can embed the story by loading . This is a great way to provide your community with a way to create stories right from your site.
This is only the start. We plan to open a Sources API so that any developer can build a source for any service. Please come see us at our booth at the Google I/O Sandbox if you’re interested in joining our developer community. And check out this article in the New York Times to learn more.

Come see Storify in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O on May 10-11.

Xavier Damman is the co-founder of Storify. He is also the founder of HackDemocracy, a community of hackers who want to improve our democracies using technology.

Building on YouTube APIs in the cloud with Google Apps Script

Ikai — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 21:00:00 +0000

There’s nothing better in this world than a great pairing, like coffee and donuts or bees and honey. Today there’s a new one to add to the list: Google Apps Script now has built in support for the YouTube Data v3 and YouTube Analytics APIs. If you haven’t yet heard of Google Apps Script, you’re missing out on an easy-to-use tool for integrating and automating common tasks across many of Google’s services. With less than half a screen’s worth of code in Google Apps Script’s cloud-based editor, you can:

Dynamically update a spreadsheet containing watch-time statistics for all of your channel's videos, with all the flexibility and power of Google Sheets to sort and slice that data
Create a live dashboard or scheduled email report about your channel's performance
Handle channel management tasks such as scheduling automatic bulletins or changing the visibility of a large number of videos from private to public
Automate playlist rotation without having to maintain a server or keep a computer for the sole purpose of running a script

Google Apps Script's cloud-based environment and autocomplete functionality make it easy to just open an editor, enable the YouTube APIs, and start writing code:

For functions that require OAuth 2.0 authorization, there’s no authorization code to write and no token management to deal with. Once your script is ready, just click “Run” and Google Apps Script will present you with an authorization dialog. Once you select the channel you want to authorize, the script will have all of the permissions it needs to operate on your behalf, running in the background at scheduled intervals if you so desire.

To get started, browse to Google Drive. Click “Create” and then choose “Script”. This will open a new browser tab to the Google Apps Script editor. Name your project and click on “Resources” and select “Advanced Google Services”:

Toggle the YouTube Data API and/or YouTube Analytics API on:

Note the message that these services must be enabled in the API console. Click the link to be taken to the Google Developer Console. The link in the message will take you to a specific API project created for this specific Apps Script. Scroll down and toggle on the YouTube APIs the script will use:

Switch back to the tab containing Google Apps Script and click “OK”. You’re ready to start writing code. Type “YouTube” and hit the period key (“.”). If the APIs have been turned on correctly, you will be able to start writing code and calling functions available in the Data API or Analytics API. For instance, a short script that searches for videos about “dogs” and prints the video IDs to the Google Apps Script log would look like this:

function searchByKeyword() {
  var results = YouTube.Search.list("id,snippet", 
                   {q : "google apps script", maxResults: 25});
  
  for(var i in results.items) {
    var item = results.items[i];
    Logger.log("[%s] Title: %s", item.id.videoId, item.snippet.title);
  }
}

For more information about this update to Google Apps Script, check out the post on their official blog. To learn more about how to integrate scheduled jobs, write to spreadsheets or any of the many things Google Apps Script can do, check out the tutorials at their home at developers.google.com/apps-script. If you’re the type that prefers to learn on the go, get started with your own copy of our sample code in your Google Drive. You will still need to enable the APIs, so don’t forget to go to “Resources > Advanced Google services” for the link to the Developer Console project to turn on the APIs.

If you have any questions, feel free to find us on StackOverflow under the youtube-api and google-apps-script tags. Happy coding!

- Ikai Lan
YouTube Developer Relations

3.. 2.. 1.. and you are LIVE!

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 21:31:00 +0000

Since the YouTube Live Streaming API is announced, we’ve seen great tools and apps that helped eligible channels to stream their content on YouTube.

Now that the YouTube Live Streaming platform is open to all verified channels, your live streaming apps will have a wider audience than ever.

How to start integration with the YouTube Live API:

Documentation

The Getting Started guide explains basic concepts of YouTube Live Streaming and of the API itself.
The Life of a Broadcast guide walks you through the typical steps for creating and managing a live broadcast on YouTube.
The YouTube Live Streaming Guide identifies the encoder settings, bitrates, and resolutions that the YouTube Live Streaming platform supports.

Sample code and tools

Client libraries for many different programming languages can help you implement the YouTube Live Streaming API as well as many other Google APIs.
Don't write code from scratch! Our Java, PHP, and Python code samples will help you get started.
The APIs Explorer lets you try out sample calls before writing any code.

In addition, in this video, we talk about the philosophy we followed in building the API and also show some great demos from our partners to help stimulate your creativity.

Stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

-Satyajeet Salgar, Tim James, Ibrahim Ulukaya and the YouTube Live Streaming Team

Let your users discover live events and track their audience

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 16:11:00 +0000

YouTube Live streaming platform enables eligible channels to stream live content on YouTube.

With the addition of live streaming content to the Data API, you can make it easier for users to find information about these live streaming events:

get search results indicating whether a video is an upcoming or active live broadcast
get both scheduled and actual values of start and end time of the broadcast
get concurrent viewer count of a broadcast
search for live content via eventType filter

How to start implementing new features

The basics

The new snippet.liveBroadcastContent property in search results indicates whether a video or channel resource has live broadcast content. Valid property values are upcoming, active, and none.
The video resource's new liveStreamingDetails property is an object that contains metadata about a live video broadcast. To retrieve this metadata, include liveStreamingDetails in the part parameter value's list of resource parts when calling the videos.list, videos.insert, or videos.update method. The metadata includes the following new properties: actualStartTime, actualEndTime, scheduledStartTime, scheduledEndTime, concurrentViewers.
The search.list method's eventType parameter and the search result's snippet.liveBroadcastContent property.

Sample code and tools

Client libraries for many different programming languages can help you implement the YouTube Live Streaming API as well as many other Google APIs.
Don't write code from scratch! Our Java, PHP, and Python code samples will help you get started.

The APIs Explorer lets you try out sample calls before writing any code.

Stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

Keep it live,

-Derek Tan, Ibrahim Ulukaya and the YouTube Live Streaming Team

Spice up your channel with the InVideo Programming API

Ikai — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 20:53:00 +0000

If you’ve used InVideo Programming before, you know that it’s a powerful way to attract subscribers to your channel. By featuring a watermark or a hit video on all videos on your channel, you can showcase the best of what your channel has to offer. You can also add a link to your home on social networks with a custom message to drive two-way conversation with your viewers on multiple fronts.

“That’s awesome,” you might say. “I’m already using it via the YouTube.com website!” Well, great! But did you know these options are available via our v3 Data API? The API enables all kinds of interesting use cases. Some examples:

Update the message to tease your latest tweet. When users click on your link, they are taken to your Twitter page
Feature the most recent upload to any channel on YouTube
Run a channel about television? You can write a script to rotate the featured video depending on whether it is the afternoon or the evening, a weekday or a weekend! Or, rotate the featured video daily to drive more views, reshares and discussion of quality content that might not be as fresh
Build a widget on your website or mobile app that lets your subscribers vote for a video to be featured every week! The video doesn’t have to be a video from your channel - it can be any video on YouTube!

InVideo Programming options are set as part of the channels resource, passed as a parameter to youtube.channels.update() in the invideoPromotion field. For instance, to feature this recent “YouTube Developers Live” show featuring our team’s favorite moments, I would structure the invideoPromotion field in my API request’s payload body like this:

invideoPromotion": {

"items": [

{

"id": {

"type": "video",

"videoId": "lzaYch2mqlU"

"timing": {

"type": "offsetFromStart",

"offsetMs": "0",

"durationMs": "15000"

}

]

}

Other options for the type field in the id object include website and recentUpload, which correspond to InVideo Programming featuring a link, or automatically updating InVideo Programming featuring the latest video in a channel. For more information, see the documentation describing the invideoPromotion object in the channels resource.

A video featuring a watermark (top right) and InVideo Programming (bottom left)

Chances are good, though, that you’re using one of our API client libraries, which will help translate these API requests and responses into programmatic objects that you can manipulate and pass around in your code.

InVideo Programming functionality is relatively new, so if you are using an API client for a language like Java or .NET, you will need to make sure your client libraries are up-to-date before you can take advantage of these new features. Our samples are sorted by programming language on our Github page.

You can also set a channel’s watermark using the Data API’s watermarks.set() method. Watermarks are images that appear in the upper right hand corner of your videos that will link viewers to your channel on web and in the YouTube mobile apps for Android and iOS. This is usefu

InVideo Programming lets you reinforce your channel’s brand and drive viewers to other videos or social channels. The API makes it easy for your team to integrate InVideo Programming into your tools and workflow to make them more dynamic and interesting. Integrating the API into your tools and workflow only help to make your InVideo Programming more dynamic.

Happy coding!

- Ikai Lan, YouTube API team

What to watch? Our APIs can help!

Jeffrey Posnick — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 19:00:00 +0000

It’s an age-old question: what to watch? Applications that integrate with YouTube have access to countless hours of videos, and, as a developer, you have an interest in helping your users find the videos and channel most relevant to them. This blog post will walk you through a few ways that you can use the latest YouTube Data API to discover great content.

If you have an OAuth 2 token for the current user, your application can make a call to youtube.activities.list(part=”snippet”, home=true) to get back a list of videos and channels similar to the recommendations that the user would see on the YouTube.com home page. These results are customized for each individual user, and the list is kept fresh automatically, so it’s a great way to present your users with content they’re likely to enjoy.

Even if your users are not logged in, there are still are a few charts and guides at your disposal to aid in discovery.

To find popular videos your users might want to watch, youtube.videos.list(part=”snippet”, chart=”mostPopular”) is the basic API call to use. By default, it will return a list of videos in any category that are considered popular globally. If this is too broad a list, though, you can narrow things down using the regionCode or videoCategoryId (or both) parameters. regionCode can be set to a two-letter country code to retrieve a list of videos popular in that specific country (though not every country is currently supported). videoCategoryId needs to be set to an ID corresponding to one of our existing video categories—you can retrieve a list of valid categories and their corresponding IDs via youtube.videoCategories.list(part=”snippet”, regionCode=”XX”), where “XX” is also a two-letter country code.

There’s an analogous set of API calls that you could make to find channels your users might be interested in. youtube.guideCategories.list(part=”snippet”, regionCode=”XX”) will return a list of all the channel categories that are available in a given country. Once a user has chosen a category, you can get back a list of the most relevant channels in that category via a call to youtube.channels.list(part=”snippet”, categoryId=”CATEGORY_ID”), where “CATEGORY_ID” is the ID of the guide category you’re interested in. At that point, you could display a list of the most recent videos associated with each channel, and give your users the option of subscribing (assuming they grant OAuth 2 authorization first).

All of these examples assume that you’re using the latest version of the YouTube Data API, v3. Developers still using the Data API v1 or v2 should be aware of some recent changes to our older content discovery mechanism, standard feeds. As explained in the documentation, all of the previous different types of standard feeds are now returning the equivalent of the most_popular feed, with the time parameter set to “today”. If you are still using v1 or v2, there’s no time like the present (time=”today”, if you will) to make the switch to v3.

Update: For a walkthrough and demos of all the API calls, please watch this episode of YouTube Developers Live:

Cheers,

—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Here’s my playlist, so submit a video, maybe?

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 18:53:00 +0000

Update: YouTube Direct Lite for iOS is now available as well. This version demonstrates best practices for using the YouTube APIs on iOS.

YouTube Direct Lite allows you to solicit videos from your users and then moderate those submissions into standard YouTube playlists for display. And now there is an app for that.

With the YouTube Direct Lite apps (Android, iOS), your fans can

record a new video,
upload an existing video from their device,
pick one of their own YouTube uploads

and submit to your playlist, all from their Android device. You can then moderate their submissions, which won't show up in your playlist till you explicitly approve them.

YouTube Direct Lite platform doesn’t require any server-side code that needs to be configured or deployed. As the moderator, you will see a playlist of videos waiting for your approval. The videos you approve, will be added into your channel.

How to start using the Android application

1) Register your Android app

2) Enable the Youtube Data API v3 and Google+ API in your API Console.

3) Include the Google Play Services library in your project to build this application.

4) Plug your Playlist Id into Constants.java and Android API Key into Auth.java


Main Activity	YouTube player	Upload Service

How to start using the iOS application

1) Enable the YouTube Data API

2) Plug your Playlist Id, Client ID and Client Secret into Utils.h

2) Install the Google Client Library.

3) Run the sample


Uploads Playlist	iFrame Player	YouTube Upload

Open-sourced to reference best practices of YouTube APIs on Android and iOS

YouTube Direct Lite apps (Android, iOS) are open-sourced projects and you are more than welcome to customize them for your needs. You can also contribute back to the projects with bug reports, feature or merge requests.

Android application uses the YouTube Data API v3, YouTube Android Player API, YouTube Resumable Uploads, Google Play Services and Plus API.

In addition to Android best practices for the YouTube APIs, this project follows the design and development guidelines for Android. This project adheres to Holo style, typography, 48dp rhythm, iconography and uses IntentService, BigPictureStyle notification, and GoogleAccountCredential.

iOS application uses the YouTube Data API v3, the YouTube iFrame Player API, and YouTube Resumable Uploads.

In addition, in these videos, we talk about the philosophy we followed in building these apps and a few best practices for the Youtube APIs, Android, and iOS development.

This App is still experimental, so stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

Cheers,
—Ibrahim Ulukaya, YouTube API Team

Streaming to YouTube Live? Put an API on it!

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:39:00 +0000

The YouTube Live Streaming API makes it easier to build tools and apps for channels that are enabled to stream live content on YouTube. With the YouTube Live platform, you have the ability to real-time transcode to a range of video qualities that support a broad set of devices and networks, dynamic bandwidth adjustment so viewers automatically see the highest quality stream their network supports, and DVR-like controls to allow viewers to pause, fast forward, and rewind during a live stream.

How to start developing with live streams

The basics

A broadcast represents a live event that you'll stream on YouTube. The API lets you schedule a broadcast, bind it to your live video stream, and update its status to testing, live, or complete.
A stream represents the actual broadcast content.
A cuepoint represents an ad break that can be inserted into a live broadcast. Cuepoints are only available to YouTube content partners.

Documentation

The Getting Started guide explains these concepts in more detail and explains how they interact with other YouTube Data API and YouTube Content ID API resources.
The Life of a Broadcast guide walks you through the typical steps for creating and managing a live broadcast on YouTube.
The YouTube Live Streaming Guide identifies the encoder settings, bitrates, and resolutions that the YouTube Live Streaming platform supports.

Sample code and tools

Client libraries for many different programming languages can help you implement the YouTube Live Streaming API as well as many other Google APIs.
Don't write code from scratch! Our Java, PHP, and Python code samples will help you get started.
The APIs Explorer lets you try out sample calls before writing any code.

In addition, in this video, we talk about the philosophy we followed in building the API and also see some great demos from our partners.

Awesome examples

Here are a few great examples from developers already using the API:

Capella’s Cambria Live

Capella’s Cambria Live encodes live broadcasts in real time and streams them to YouTube Live. Cambria Live takes uncompressed broadcast video directly from a camera via SDI or HDMI and compresses it into the H.264 format with AAC audio, ensuring optimal video and audio quality.

Elgato

Elgato Game Capture HD enables you to stream PlayStation or Xbox gameplay to share it with your friends and fans as it happens. Elgato’s video products enable high-quality video recording and conversion for consumers and professionals alike.


XSplit		Radioline

XSplit is a streaming and video-mixing application that is fun and easy to use. It is widely-used for streaming games.

Radioline designs and operates a cloud-based mobile internet radio. You can find or discover new radio stations according to their names, genres, areas or according to your favorite playlists.

This API is still experimental, so stay tuned here and subscribe to the YouTube for Developers channel to keep up on the latest.

Cheers,

-- Derek Tan, Satyajeet Salgar, and the YouTube Live Streaming API Team

The Helping Hand of an Expert

Jarek Wilkiewicz — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:17:00 +0000

Have you ever been stuck working on a problem only to receive a solution from a friendly person you've never met? Some of the most helpful responses on Stack Overflow and open source code examples have been contributed by our YouTube API community members. The Google Developer Expert (GDE) program is designed to recognize the active and passionate YouTube API developers who make these outstanding contributions.

Each year, Google Developer Experts are selected for their existing accomplishments using Google technologies, their continued passion for these technologies, and their willingness to engage with and mentor other developers.

To learn more about what it’s like to be a GDE, check out this interview with two of our 2013 YouTube API GDEs, Matias Molinas from Argentina and Tim Wintle from the U.K.

If you’d like to share your knowledge, connect with us on +YouTubeDev, contribute to Stack Overflow, and find like-minded developers at your local Google Developer Group (GDG).

Cheers,

—Jarek Wilkiewicz and Jeremy Walker, YouTube API Team

YouTube for Developers on… YouTube!

Jeffrey Posnick — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:26:00 +0000

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

Ibrahim Ulukaya — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 19:28:00 +0000

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:

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

Jarek Wilkiewicz — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:19:00 +0000

Adding a high-quality video experience to your Android application just got a whole lot easier. Starting today, you can embed and play YouTube videos in your app using the new YouTube Android Player API.

The API, which was pre-announced at Google I/O 2012, offers these benefits:

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

We are launching the API as experimental, though we do not expect major interface changes going forward.

The Only Limit Now is Your Imagination (and ToS)

These instructions explain how to include the YouTubeAndroidPlayerApi.jar client library in your Android application. The library is supported on Android devices running version 4.2.16 or newer of the Android YouTube app.

You can use the YouTubeApiServiceUtil class' isYouTubeApiServiceAvailable method to confirm that a device is compatible.

For a simple embed, use the YouTubeStandalonePlayer. To build a more sophisticated user interface, try the YouTubePlayerView or the YouTubePlayerFragment. Fragments can help create an engaging experience as shown in the Video Wall app example.

Play With These Apps

Here are a few interesting apps available for you to explore:

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.

Check out a few screen shots below or download the apps from Google Play today!


Flipboard	BuzzFeed	Fitness Flow by Skimble

Learn More

If you would like to learn more about the YouTube Android Player API, the documentation is a great place to start. In addition, we have curated useful videos in this playlist. Please subscribe to the YouTube for Developers' channel to keep up on the latest.

Check Out The Sample Code

We’ve prepared several code examples to make it easy for you to get started with the new API. You will find them on code.google.com. The description of the examples is available in our documentation. If you need additional help with the API feel free to use our support resources.

Cheers,
-- Ross McIlroy, Anton Hansson, and Horia Ciurdar, YouTube Mobile Team

Using WebM to power the YouTube app for Nintendo Wii

Jeremy W — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:26:00 +0000

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.”

Cool YouTube apps from Google I/O 2012

Jeremy W — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:17:00 +0000

We're constantly amazed at the innovative ways that developers incorporate YouTube into their applications. At Google I/O this year, 12 partners (over 30% from outside the U.S.) demonstrated their apps in the YouTube section of the Developer Sandbox, a demo area highlighting applications based on technologies and products featured at I/O.

Google's own Daniel Sieberg, an Emmy-nominated journalist, interviewed some of our partners about their use of the YouTube APIs.

With Daniel’s hectic schedule, he only had time to interview a handful of our great partners. With that in mind, we highlighted all the awesome apps showcased by our partners at the YouTube API Developer Sandbox.

Business.me (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview	Business.me, headquartered in Singapore, is the place to share and discover videos about business. They have created a video-sharing site to help producers of business videos reach their audience. The site also helps business professionals discover relevant business information in video format.
Fun Fact	Oscar Moreno, CEO, not only holds Business and Law degrees, he helped launch several startups (Business.me, Netjuice, Keldoo, and Tuenti).

Code Hero (YouTube Data API)

Overview	Code Hero teaches you to code through a fun, 3D game. Become a code hero and shape the future!
Fun Fact	The Code Hero Team implemented the recording mechanism in the game that exports to YouTube at a 3 day hackathon! Bonus: The game has sharks with lasers attached to their heads!

Flipboard (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)

Overview	See everything on Flipboard, all your news and life’s great moments in one place. Using the YouTube Data API, Flipboard lets users discover, rate, share, and comment on top videos from YouTube. In addition, users can access their own videos and subscriptions, and subscribe to other YouTube users.
Fun Fact	Flipboard launched an Android app one week before I/O with a YouTube and Google+ integration!

LOOT Entertainment by Sony DADC (YouTube Data API)
Overview Gather your friends and set up your own production crew inside PlayStation®Home! What will you be? Director? Actor? Cinematographer? Extra? Try them all! Check out the amazing Machinima tools to help you record, light and build your film or television sets! What will you make?
Fun Fact LOOT gives you tons of sets to make your own movies (machinima) on the PS3, including a Ghostbusters Firehouse Stage Set!

Moviecom.tv (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)
Overview A simple and easy online video platform for businesses. Record, centralize and share instantly. Moviecom.tv also allows you to link directly to your YouTube account through the YouTube APIs.
Fun Fact The founders flew all the way from Glasgow to attend Google I/O!

Parrot (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)
Overview The Parrot AR.Drone is a quadricopter that can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet. Get more out of your AR.Drone with the AR.Drone Academy. Keep track of all your flights on the Academy map. Watch your best videos with added statistical feedback and directly share online with pilots from all over the world!
Fun Fact Parrot makes remote controlled flying devices that can record and track their flights!

PicoTube - Vettl, Inc. (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)
Overview Picotube uses content from YouTube and allows users to create avatars, watch clips together, create playlists, and rate videos selected by other video jockeys.
Fun Fact Picotube was the Grand Prix winner of TechCrunch Tokyo 2011!

Skimble (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API, and new Android Player API)
Overview Here to power the mobile fitness movement, Skimble offers fun, dynamic and social applications for everyone. Available now are Skimble's Workout Trainer and GPS Sports Tracker apps that help motivate people to get and stay active. Skimble uses the YouTube Player API to display fitness videos.
Fun Fact Co-founder Maria Ly got the crowd moving at one of YouTube’s Google I/O Sessions!

Squrl (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)
Overview Squrl is a great place to watch and discover video. Know what videos are trending, receive recommendations on what to watch and see what your friends are watching.
Fun Fact Co-founders Mark Gray and Michael Hoydich also founded the successful software development company IndustryNext together in 2004!

Telestream (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)
Overview Telestream demonstrated Wirecast for YouTube, a live video production and streaming product, which was developed specifically for Google YouTube partners. Telestream specializes in products that make it possible to get video content to any audience regardless of how the content is created, distributed or viewed (entire process).
Fun Fact Telestream’s NASCAR Project won the IBC2012 Innovation Award!

Vidcaster (YouTube Data API and YouTube Player API)
Overview VidCaster is a video site creation platform that allows you to create a video portal instantly from your existing video library on YouTube or other video hosts. Choose from a beautiful set of designer themes and customize to your heart's content using VidCaster's powerful template language.
Fun Fact Kieran Farr, CEO and co-founder, used to drive a taxi full-time in San Francisco before becoming a successful entrepreneur!

WeVideo (YouTube Data API)
Overview WeVideo is a cloud-based video editing suite that allows easy, full-featured, collaborative HD video editing across Google Drive, Chromebooks, and Android devices.
Fun Fact WeVideo partnered with Marvel and YouTube to allow fans to create their own trailers!

YouTube Channels: Get with the Program!

Jeremy W — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 19:57:00 +0000

It's never been easier to create compelling videos and build a social presence on YouTube. At this year's Google I/O, YouTube product managers and channel gurus Dror and A.J. presented tips and tricks for making great content centered around raising brand awareness, raising money, and obtaining feedback about your products and services.

Don't worry if you missed their talk, we recorded it! So, sit back, grab some popcorn, and get ready to learn how to showcase your brand in front of YouTube's 800 million unique visitors per month!

Click here to view the slides from the video above.

Not sold yet? Well, have a sneak peek at some of the great material they cover below, and remember Dror and A.J.’s number one recommendation: make content, not commercials!

Sneak Peek

Tips and Tricks

Hook the user in the first 15 seconds (or they'll leave)
Brand your channel!
Make the most of your budget

Review YouTube’s Trends for ideas
Camera shy? Consider animation. (It might actually be cheaper than video.)
Several successful channels focus on curating videos from their community
Enhance your videos without fancy software/hardware using the YouTube Editor or other integrated web editors

Many, many more...

What's your goal?

Raising awareness

Master your PR via video (include all your features and make bloggers’ lives easier)
Provide product/service demo videos to promote your company
Tell backstories about clients using your products/services

Raising money

Add video to your crowdfunding pitch to increase funds raised by 114% (source: Indiegogo)

Researching and supporting users

Record tutorials to promote and educate (see which features are the most popular using YouTube’s Analytics... you might be surprised)
Use Google Hangouts for scalable office hours and virtual focus groups
Figure out what features customers like/dislike via the world’s largest focus group

Resources to learn more

Creator Hub
Creator Playbook (what you wish you knew about YouTube)
Trends Dashboard
YouTube for Developers (that’s us)

Wow, you made it this far without watching the video? Did we tell you they fill the presentation with awesome videos that showcase their points (including Chuck Testa)? Nope!? Well, now you know, and you will definitely want to watch the whole thing!

-Jeremy Walker, YouTube API Team

The YouTube API on Stack Overflow

Jeffrey Posnick — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 18:53:00 +0000

Many of you are already familiar with the terrific Stack Overflow website, which has become the de facto resource on the web for all types of programming questions. And many of you have been asking YouTube API questions on Stack Overflow for some time now, but haven’t received any official responses from the YouTube API Developer Relations team. That’s because, for the past five years or so, our focus has been on providing developer support via our dedicated Google Group. We’ve decided that instead of continuing to maintain a dedicated Google Group for YouTube API questions, it would help more users if we focused on responding to Stack Overflow posts.

We encourage all developers who have questions about the YouTube API to start posting on Stack Overflow today using the tag youtube-api. You can use this new question template to pre-populate the tag for you so that you don’t forget. While we’ll do our best to find and answer relevant questions that aren’t tagged with youtube-api, you’d be making our job easier (and you’d get a quicker answer) if you tag things correctly from the get-go.

Here are a few tips for folks new to Stack Overflow:

Before posting, search to make sure your question hasn't been asked before. To do this, put [youtube-api] as the first part of your search, then type in some keywords that describe your problem or question.
If you need to ask a question, make sure you apply the youtube-api tag, as well as the tag that indicates the language that you're using. If you're using PHP to access the API, your question should be tagged youtube-api as well as php.
Make sure you watch your question after posting it, as experts that can provide you with an answer might leave comments to ask you for clarification.

Stack Overflow prides itself in being a destination for questions and answers, and not a place to file bug reports or feature requests. We ask that developers do not post on Stack Overflow for those sorts of things, and instead make use of the templates we have for filing a bug or filing a feature request in our existing public issue tracker. (Be sure to check the list of existing open issues before filing a duplicate.)

On October 15, we’ll be switching the existing discussion Google Group into archive-only mode, meaning that it will no longer accept any new posts. You don’t have to wait until October 15 to start asking questions on Stack Overflow or to file reports in the issue tracker, though.

For those developers who mainly “lurked” in the discussion Google Group and used it as a way of getting official announcements about the YouTube API, we have a number of other communication channels to recommend. Subscribing to this blog’s RSS feed is a great idea, for instance. You can also follow us on Google+ at http://google.com/+YouTubeDev. If you’d like to submit a question to one of our weekly YouTube Developers Live broadcasts, you can do that for the next upcoming scheduled show. Finally, for those who prefer to get updates via email, we will be keeping the announce-only Google Group active, and we’ll continue to post important messages there.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Video Tags: Just for Uploaders

Jeffrey Posnick — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:54:00 +0000

Update: This change also applies to tags, which were not mentioned in the original announcement.

If you follow the YouTube Creator Blog, you might have recently seen a post announcing that video tags (also known as keywords) would no longer be displayed to viewers of a video on YouTube’s website. They aren’t going away from the video itself, though—the owner of the video can still create tags for new videos and edit tags for existing videos, and video tags will still provide an important signal used to surface relevant results when searching for videos.

We’re going to be making some corresponding changes to all versions of the YouTube Data API to mimic this behavior in API responses. Starting later today, August 28, on the staging server and September 4 on the production server, any time you get a video entry back from any API method, it will have an empty element. This is a valid response from the API that your application should already handle gracefully, since videos are not required to have any keywords to begin with.

The exception to this rule is when you make authenticated requests to the API, and you request a video entry that’s owned by the currently authorized user. In that scenario, you will get back a element that contains the full list of tags for the video, and you can read, update, or remove those video tags using the standard API operations.

Important: If your application allows video owners to update the metadata of their videos, please ensure that you include the proper Authorization header for both read and write operations. Otherwise, you could accidentally return an empty list of video tags when retrieving an existing video, and end up overwriting the video’s tags if you update the metadata. Video tags continue to play an important role in helping viewers discover your videos when searching on YouTube.com or via the API, so if your application does support metadata editing, please make sure you allow owners to tag their videos properly.

Cheers,
—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

PLaylists: now with more PL

YouTube Staff — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:51:00 +0000

If you ever pay attention to your browser’s location bar, you may have noticed that, for a while now, the YouTube.com website has used playlist IDs that are prefixed with the characters “PL” when constructing the URLs for playlist pages. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72CF07D200AA2AFA is one example of that. This practice of prepended playlist IDs previously didn’t extend over to the Data API—PL72CF07D200AA2AFA would not have been recognized as a valid playlist ID, but 72CF07D200AA2AFA would have.

Starting later today, Wednesday, August 22, the YouTube Data API will accept playlist IDs with the “PL” prefix whenever they’re used as metadata or in API request URLs. In most responses, the API will return playlist IDs with “PL” prefixes. The one exception is that for the next few days, searching for playlists will return playlist ids without the “PL” prefix. This will change on Tuesday, August 28, at which point the “PL” prefix will be included in playlist search results as well.

While we will continue to support using unprefixed playlist IDs as metadata or in API request URLs for the time being, at some point in the future we may require the “PL” prefix to be used whenever a playlist ID is provided. We’ll provide additional guidance if we do decide to stop supporting requests with unprefixed playlist IDs.

This change should be backwards compatible, but if you’re currently manipulating or comparing the playlist IDs that are returned via the API in any way, or making any assumptions about the length of the ID (which you shouldn't be), please make sure that your code will handle IDs that contain the “PL” prefix.

If you have any questions about this changes, please let us know in our developer forum.

Cheers,
—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

Party Playlist Picker: An experimental project written in Python

Shannon -jj Behrens — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 20:39:00 +0000

When Google+ first came out, we were really excited about the idea of writing some open source code to showcase how you could integrate YouTube with Google+. After some brainstorming, we came up with the idea of letting people collaboratively edit a playlist in realtime, and we started hacking!

We started working on Party Playlist Picker in early 2011. We’ve always wanted to release our experiment as an open source project, and you can now download the code to see one example of integrating Google+ functionality to enrich a YouTube application.

Party Playlist Picker is a Google App Engine application written in Python. It uses a Google+ share button so that partygoers can invite their friends to come edit a playlist in realtime. That feature is based on the Google App Engine channel API. It makes use of the gdata-python-client library to talk to YouTube and the google-api-python-client library to talk to Google+. It’s currently using version 1 of the YouTube API (because that’s what gdata-python-client uses), and we used OAuth 2 for authentication. In fact, we made good use of the Python client library to manage the OAuth 2 tokens for us automatically.

There’s also a lot of jQuery-based JavaScript goodness. For instance, you can search for videos without reloading the page, and you can simply drag them to add them to the playlist. If multiple people edit the page at the same time, the list of videos is updated in realtime whenever a change is made. You can also watch videos right on the page. Last of all, it keeps track of who’s edited the playlist, and whether they’re currently editing it.

There are a bunch of subtle HTML5 tricks thrown in as well. For instance, the application supports voice search, and we made a clever use of gradients to fade overflow text in the video descriptions.

Here’s a screenshot of the application:

If you’re interested in learning more, you can play around with a running version of it, or you can download the source code and hack away! If you have any questions, post them to our developer forum.

Update: Watch JJ, Jeff, and Danny Hermes (from the App Engine Developer Relations team) talk about Party Playlist Picker as part of YouTube Developers Live:

Cheers,
--Shannon -jj Behrens and Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

Build Compelling Experiences Using YouTube Embeds With The IFrame Player API

YouTube Staff — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 22:44:00 +0000

If you've hesitated to use the player in your app due to the IFrame Player API's experimental status, then wait no more. We've removed that API's 'experimental' tag, which means the API is production-ready and is covered by YouTube's deprecation policy. Since the embed is the default way of sharing YouTube videos on the Web, the IFrame Player API is now the recommended mechanism to control video playback behavior in your Web applications.

To provide a consistent developer experience with the YouTube Upload Widget, we’ve changed the the URL for loading the IFrame Player API code to https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api. The old URL (http://www.youtube.com/player_api) is now deprecated, though it will continue to work. Similarly, the iframe API initialization callback name has been changed to onYouTubeIframeAPIReady from onYouTubePlayerAPIReady, also for consistency with the YouTube Upload Widget. The old callback name, onYouTubePlayerAPIReady, is now deprecated as well. If your app uses both the YouTube Upload Widget as well as the IFrame Player API, you only need to include the script once and handle a single initialization callback.

Going forward, we'll continue making improvements to the IFrame API and make it work better with mobile platforms. As before, you can find the details about the API in our documentation and ask questions about it on our developer forum.

Cheers,
--Jarek Wilkiewicz, YouTube API Team

Know What’s Loaded?

YouTube Staff — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever developed a custom playback experience based on our Player API, you’ve probably used the getVideoBytesLoaded() and getVideoBytesTotal() methods to determine how much the current video is locally buffered and the size of the entire video. After obtaining this information, the next logical step is to divide the number of bytes loaded by the total number of bytes to obtain the fraction of the video that’s been buffered, which you can then display in your custom user interface.

Instead of taking this two-step approach to calculate how much of a video has buffered, we encourage you to use the new getVideoLoadedFraction() method. It will return a numerical value between 0.0 and 1.0 that represents the same fraction obtained by dividing getVideoBytesLoaded() by getVideoBytesTotal(). While those two legacy methods still work today, they are now officially deprecated, as per the terms of our deprecation policy.

getVideoLoadedFraction() allows us to expose more accurate information to your code about the state of the video that’s currently playing across a wider range of playback scenarios. When HTML5 playback was used in the Player, for instance, we previously had to return “fake” values for getVideoBytesLoaded() and getVideoBytesTotal(), as the true byte counts weren’t directly exposed via the element. The value returned by getVideoLoadedFraction() should be correct for that and other playback scenarios that we roll out in the future.

If you have any questions about the new method or anything else related to the YouTube APIs, please let us know in the developer forum.

Cheers,
—Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube API Team

Let’s Hear It From Your Users!

YouTube Staff — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:09:00 +0000

Over the past few years we’ve heard two specific pieces of feedback from the YouTube API community:

Developers have clamored for years for a way of embedding a webcam YouTube upload widget on their web pages, similar to the webcam upload tool available at youtube.com/my_webcam.
Developers who have used YouTube Direct in the past have asked for a simpler solution that doesn’t require the same level of technical expertise to set up and manage.

Knowing about this demand made us particularly excited for our Google I/O announcements of the YouTube Upload Widget that supports webcam uploads, and YouTube Direct Lite, both of which are now available for public use.

YouTube Upload Widget
Using the YouTube Upload Widget on your site is as simple as adding an to your HTML, like so:

Developers who want more control over the uploads experience can use a full JavaScript API to initiate the widget, and listen for events related to the upload.

YouTube Direct Lite
YouTube Direct Lite is a complete rewrite of the existing YouTube Direct platform. The goal of the project remains the same: make it possible to solicit videos from your users and then moderate those submissions into standard YouTube playlists for display. The difference is that YouTube Direct Lite is implemented purely in client-side HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and unlike with YouTube Direct, no Java App Engine deployment is needed. You can download the YouTube Direct Lite code, customize it, and deploy it on your own web server along with the rest of your site’s content. To make things even easier, we’re hosting a canonical deployment of YouTube Direct Lite that you could include on your pages without having to deploy anything at all—just add the appropriate tag to your page.

You can find a live example of YouTube Direct Lite integration, including the use of the YouTube Upload Widget, on this sample page. Feel free to use that page to submit a video letting us know how you plan on using the new tools.

Bringing the YouTube Upload Widget and YouTube Direct Lite to web developers and community maintainers will give you new tools to hear from (and see!) your community, and who knows what great things will come from that!

Cheers,
—Eric Lundberg, Jeff Posnick and Vladimir Vuskovic, YouTube API Team

YouTube @ the Google Developers Academy

YouTube Staff — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 19:29:00 +0000

Whether you’re a fledgling developer looking to get started with an API or a skilled developer who wants to learn some new tricks, you’ll find engaging material at the Google Developers Academy. Of particular interest to readers of this blog is the YouTube section, which hosts courses specific to the YouTube APIs.

The first course walks JavaScript developers through the steps needed to embed an Player on their page along with a list of chapter titles. It’s perfect when you want to embed a lengthy video that consists of multiple sub-sections, since jumping from section to section is as easy as clicking on predefined links. Check out the live demo of a page with videos from last year’s Google I/O conference to see the player in action.

We will be gradually adding to the YouTube section of the Google Developers Academy, and we’ll announce the new courses on this blog and our YouTube for Developers Google+ page. Stay tuned for more great resources!

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

All Good Things Must Come to an end=

Jarek Wilkiewicz — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 22:50:00 +0000

If you enjoy the ability to easily start video playback at a specific time using the start parameter, you may also like being able to stop it early. Here’s an example:

end=119" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

The end parameter is a positive integer, and it represents the number of seconds from the beginning of the video. If your friends are not into merengue dancing canines, you can now tease them with short clips of videos like the one below:

Cheers,
--Jarek Wilkiewicz, YouTube API Team

Build awesome YouTube experiences with new APIs and tools

Amanda Surya — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 21:13:00 +0000

When we introduced the first YouTube API in 2005, we knew that it would be developers who would help us grow YouTube as a platform for connecting the world through video. At this year’s Google I/O, we’re continuing on with that mission through an entire track dedicated to YouTube, where we’re announcing new APIs and developer tools, as
well as a showcase of some of the most innovative apps built with YouTube.

Make mobile video shine
With mobile video now making up as much as half of all mobile traffic, your mobile experience needs video that’s high quality, fast and sleek. We want to give you the best tools to build these experiences, so we’re previewing the new YouTube Android Player API for high-quality and fluid video playback.

Engage with your communities through video
The next generation of YouTube Direct allows you to engage with your community by having them submit videos which you can then feature in playlists. YouTube Direct Lite is implemented in client-side JavaScript using CORS, and does not require any server-side deployments—adding it to your site is as simple as adding an

MMMmmm...data!Retrieving analytics data for your videos used to mean downloading an archive of CSV files that you then had to process. Now, you can use our new YouTube Analytics API to build custom tools for your data. It's a RESTful web service that gives you the freedom to request customized reports containing only the data you care about. We’re also giving the YouTube Data API a facelift with new features like universal search and updated client libraries in 8 different languages.

Play, watch and learn from developers like you at Google I/O

We’ll be talking about these new features and other developer tools at Google I/O this week, so check out our sessions and codelabs, download the official Google I/O app, and follow online at developers.google.com/io. At I/O you can also visit with Developer Sandbox companies like Flipboard, Dude Perfect and SONY PlayStation @ Home who are building awesome experiences with YouTube APIs. We’ll also share our sessions on the Google Developers YouTube Channel, and you can always find us on Google+ and our developer forum.

Cheers,
—Amanda Surya, YouTube API Team

Google I/O 101: YouTube for Your Business

Shannon -jj Behrens — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 01:15:00 +0000

In preparation for Google I/O, we've created a presentation for people who've never integrated with YouTube before. This video tutorial is an introduction to YouTube and its APIs with an emphasis on how you can use them for your business. It includes examples for technical and nontechnical audiences.

Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team

Google I/O 101: Using Ruby on Rails and YouTube for Education

Shannon -jj Behrens — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:25:00 +0000

Update (July 2012): The sample application demonstrated in this video, Quizzimoto, is now open source.

As a reader of this blog, you already know that YouTube offers APIs, and you probably also know that video is one of the most powerful communication mechanisms for instilling knowledge. Now you can combine the two! In this video tutorial, we'll show you that YouTube and Ruby on Rails are a great fit for building interesting educational apps. Along the way, we'll also cover OAuth2, the various client libraries for Ruby, and using test-driven development with RESTful web APIs.

Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team

The YouTube Player: Now with 30% More Playlistiness!

Shannon -jj Behrens — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:08:00 +0000

When we launched support for lists of videos in the YouTube player in March, it was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm. However, some developers pointed out that at first glance it didn’t look very much like a playlist. In particular, they wanted the list of video thumbnails to be visible all the time.

Well, you guys asked for it, and we listened. If you pass a parameter, showinfo=1, when creating the player, the list of video thumbnails will be permanently visible. Here’s an example:

showinfo=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

The corresponding embedded player is shown below:

To see all of the parameters that the YouTube player supports, refer to the documentation. If you have any questions, feel free to post them to the YouTube API Google Group.

Cheers,
—Shannon -jj Behrens, YouTube API Team

Unlocking JavaScript’s Potential with CORS

YouTube Staff — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:03:00 +0000

Web developers are accustomed to making magical user experiences with a few lines of elegant JavaScript, but when faced with talking to RESTful services like the YouTube API, the options have been anything but simple. The most common approach relies on a technique known as JSONP, which relied on dynamically inserting a

Overview	Gather your friends and set up your own production crew inside PlayStation®Home! What will you be? Director? Actor? Cinematographer? Extra? Try them all! Check out the amazing Machinima tools to help you record, light and build your film or television sets! What will you make?
Fun Fact	LOOT gives you tons of sets to make your own movies (machinima) on the PS3, including a Ghostbusters Firehouse Stage Set!

Overview	A simple and easy online video platform for businesses. Record, centralize and share instantly. Moviecom.tv also allows you to link directly to your YouTube account through the YouTube APIs.
Fun Fact	The founders flew all the way from Glasgow to attend Google I/O!

Overview	The Parrot AR.Drone is a quadricopter that can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet. Get more out of your AR.Drone with the AR.Drone Academy. Keep track of all your flights on the Academy map. Watch your best videos with added statistical feedback and directly share online with pilots from all over the world!
Fun Fact	Parrot makes remote controlled flying devices that can record and track their flights!

Overview	Picotube uses content from YouTube and allows users to create avatars, watch clips together, create playlists, and rate videos selected by other video jockeys.
Fun Fact	Picotube was the Grand Prix winner of TechCrunch Tokyo 2011!

Overview	Here to power the mobile fitness movement, Skimble offers fun, dynamic and social applications for everyone. Available now are Skimble's Workout Trainer and GPS Sports Tracker apps that help motivate people to get and stay active. Skimble uses the YouTube Player API to display fitness videos.
Fun Fact	Co-founder Maria Ly got the crowd moving at one of YouTube’s Google I/O Sessions!

Overview	Squrl is a great place to watch and discover video. Know what videos are trending, receive recommendations on what to watch and see what your friends are watching.
Fun Fact	Co-founders Mark Gray and Michael Hoydich also founded the successful software development company IndustryNext together in 2004!

Overview	Telestream demonstrated Wirecast for YouTube, a live video production and streaming product, which was developed specifically for Google YouTube partners. Telestream specializes in products that make it possible to get video content to any audience regardless of how the content is created, distributed or viewed (entire process).
Fun Fact	Telestream’s NASCAR Project won the IBC2012 Innovation Award!

Overview	VidCaster is a video site creation platform that allows you to create a video portal instantly from your existing video library on YouTube or other video hosts. Choose from a beautiful set of designer themes and customize to your heart's content using VidCaster's powerful template language.
Fun Fact	Kieran Farr, CEO and co-founder, used to drive a taxi full-time in San Francisco before becoming a successful entrepreneur!

Overview	WeVideo is a cloud-based video editing suite that allows easy, full-featured, collaborative HD video editing across Google Drive, Chromebooks, and Android devices.
Fun Fact	WeVideo partnered with Marvel and YouTube to allow fans to create their own trailers!