YouTube API Blog

Spotlight on: WatchToLearnChinese.com

2008-09-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-19T16:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-09-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

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?s=tr&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!

2008-08-28T22:15:00.001-07:00

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!

Using the YouTube Data API with App Engine and the Python Client Library

2008-08-26T13:55:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

For those of you that didn't get a chance to attend the hands-on CodeLab that Steph and I presented at Google I/O earlier this year, I just created a new tutorial that shows you how to use the YouTube Data API with App Engine and the Python Client Library.

The tutorial covers the following topics:

Writing a simple App Engine application
Test driving the Python Client Library
Using the Python Client Library with App Engine
Performing a video search
Authentication
Uploading videos

If you have any feedback or questions, drop by the discussion forum and let us know.

YouTube for Slackers

2008-08-25T14:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

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.

PixelJunk™ Eden: now fortified with YouTube APIs

2008-07-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

Posted by Christine Tsai, YouTube Syndication Product Marketing Manager

Back in May, you may remember that we announced a unique partnership with the PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3^TM) team which would allow game developers to integrate direct upload to YouTube from within PS3 games. We're excited that the latest game to feature YouTube upload functionality is PixelJunk^™Eden, a PlayStation® Network title from the popular PixelJunk series.

For all you PixelJunk fans, you'll now be able to capture video of your game recordings and upload directly to YouTube. Here are a couple examples of videos captured in-game and uploaded to YouTube:

We've already seen the significant positive impact for games like Spore and Mainichi Issho and how gamers share & show off their creations. We look forward to the day when having YouTube upload support in games will be a standard feature.

As Q-Games President Dylan Cuthbert said on the Playstation Blog, "The YouTube upload feature is going to revolutionize how people share tips". We wholeheartedly agree!

Powered By YouTube - Event Videos and Slides Online

2008-07-21T22:17:00.000-07:00

Posted by Stephanie Liu, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

All of the videos, slides, and other materials used during our first "Powered by YouTube" developer event are now online and available for mass consumption: http://sites.google.com/site/poweredbyyoutube

We had ~100 developers come and hang out with us at YouTube HQ. It was a full day, with talks ranging from best practices to the history of scaling up YouTube infrastructure and, of course, cookies, lunch and t-shirts. There were also some good discussions in our Office Hours lounge. If you're interested, the one-sheet Code Labs we had for working with the Data APIs in JSON and PHP are also available online.

Thanks to everyone for coming out, learning about the APIs, and sharing your feedback and questions with us. Special thanks goes to Slide, Qik, Animoto, Gaia Online, and Helio for speaking about their experiences working with our APIs and even walking through some code snippets.

Also, as a bonus, here's a bunch of us (Jochen, Jeff, myself) with Steve Mesa, the top poster in our discussion forum :)

Get your .NET on

2008-07-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-25T19:21:00.000-07:00

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:

<georss:where>
  <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

2008-06-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Fn ( Fried (Macaroni, Cheese), Creativity (EA, YouTube) ) = Awesome Spore Videos on YouTube

2008-06-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

Posted by Nikhil Chandhok, Product Manager - YouTube Syndication

Last March, over a lunch of fried macaroni and cheese, folks from EA and YouTube doodled about bringing the power of user-generated content to video games. After awhile, we decided that it would be cool if people could share their in-game user-generated content on YouTube as a way of demonstrating their super gaming skills, sharing accomplishments, and eventually telling more elaborate stories.

Today, we are happy to announce that our doodles have turned into reality with the launch of EA's Spore Creature Creator with YouTube APIs built into it, allowing users to share their creativity with others. Starting today, users can download the Creature Creator, build a wacky creature, and then upload their creations directly to YouTube. We announced this back in March and needless to say, we're ecstatic that the Creature Creator is now open for business. A pretty active community on YouTube has already uploaded thousands of videos.

I've highlighted some of my favorite creature videos, all uploaded from the Creature Creator:

If you haven't tried creating your own creature, you can download the Creature Creator from the Spore website. You can even enter your creature in EA's Ultimate Spore Creature Creator Dance-off contest. More information about this contest is available on the Spore YouTube channel. You can also try out YouTube's AudioSwap feature to set your creature's dancing to music.

As the world of the web and gaming meet, we are looking for interesting ways to create new entertainment experiences. In May, we announced a similar partnership with Sony Computer Entertainment which gives PS3 game developers a simple way to incorporate video upload into their video games. We continue to explore this very new and interesting space and hope that developers will continue to use our APIs in new and exciting ways!

Registrations Open for "Powered By YouTube"

2008-06-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

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.

YouTube in your Living Room

2008-06-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, Partner Technology Manager - YouTube

A little after I started at YouTube I casually asked my young niece, who seemed pretty impressed when I told her that I worked here, if she'd watch YouTube on television. She thought for a while before finally asking hesitantly, "But what would YouTube look like on TV?" I have a much better answer for her these days than I did then!

The YouTube Syndication team is excited that our users now have a number of options to consume YouTube on their television sets. We're proud to have helped many leaders in the consumer electronics space create YouTube experiences on TV.

Getting YouTube right on TV is extremely challenging from both a design and technology perspective. Each of our partners' engineering and design teams had similar questions:

* What would users, accustomed to a simple remote control interface for their TVs, expect given their typcially much richer interaction options when surfing youtube.com?
* How could the YouTube experience be personalized for TV?
* How could the extra computing power and memory often required to make this work on their devices be added effectively?
* What were the most important YouTube features to retain, and how would they translate to a 10-feet user experience?

All these partners used the YouTube APIs to build their products. One partner's summary of their experience with the APIs: "The YouTube API was very simple, but powerful. It enabled us to develop our user interface flexibly and quickly." Music to our ears!

Here's a quick overview of some products that enable you to access YouTube from your living room...or anywhere else you may have your television(s)!

AppleTV: In June 2007 this became the first product to offer a way to watch YouTube on your TV.
Sony Bravia Internet Video Link: Last week, Sony announced the general availability of YouTube content on their Bravia TVs via the Internet Video Link. Some clips from the YouTube team at the event are linked below. Nice tie, Brent!
HP MediaSmart: HP announced availability of YouTube as part of the HP MediaSmart platform.
Panasonic: At CES 2008, Panasonic announced VieraCast, which allows you to access YouTube directly from your TV. The device will be available later this month.
Samsung: Samsung launched their IPTV device which supports YouTube (currently only available in South Korea) in early May.
TiVo: Announced that YouTube would be available on their devices.
Verismo: A startup in the IPTV space, has announced availability of a YouTube-enabled device.

We're excited that the YouTube APIs have enabled these products and look forward to sharing information about even more products, upgrades and innovations from our partners going forward. The following may seem like a "marketing way" to say it, but it is true! We're determined to see more devices and applications "Powered by YouTube" so that our vision of "YouTube Everywhere" feels even more real to our users.

Videos from the Sony announcement in NYC:

And some photos!

Google I/O Wrapup

2008-06-04T13:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

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!

Let The Games Begin

2008-05-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

Posted by Nikhil Chandhok, Product Manager for YouTube Syndication

Back in March, we launched the new YouTube APIs and Tools, with the goal of making YouTube an open video services platform and available for use by any website, desktop application, or consumer device. Today, we are announcing a new partnership that takes advantage of the YouTube APIs in a new and interesting way.

We are happy to announce that PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3^TM) has integrated the YouTube APIs to allow game developers to create games that enable direct upload of in-game video captures to YouTube. This YouTube upload functionality can be incorporated not only into new PS3 game titles, but also existing PS3 titles that have the ability to receive network updates. Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has added YouTube functionality to Mainichi Issho, a popular game with PS3 users in Japan. Gamers will now be able to upload their in-game video captures to YouTube. We're excited at the opportunity this presents and look forward to more and more games to be enhanced with YouTube.

The YouTube APIs are available to all developers and we hope that game developers everywhere will use the YouTube APIs to make video an integral part of their game experience. Whether it's showing off that fantastic touchdown pass, car slide, or karaoke sing-along, we hope that more user-generated content from games will make their way to YouTube and connect with the gamer communities.

Let the games begin!

* PS3 system software must be updated to the latest version.
* “PLAYSTATION” is a registered trademark and “PS3” is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

Using the YouTube API with the PHP client library

2008-05-14T14:04:00.000-07:00

Posted by Jochen Hartmann, YouTube APIs and Tools Team

In our new video, I demonstrate how to use the YouTube API with the PHP client library to upload a video to YouTube. The screencast explains the most important parts of the YouTube demo application and includes a section on AuthSub authentication.

* For a higher quality version of the video, click on the "watch video in high quality" link on the YouTube watch page.

Also, in case you missed it, Stephanie has a tutorial on the YouTube Player APIs.