Developer Highlights: Tower of Babel Roundup

We wanted to take a minute and highlight some developers like yourselves who have been writing helpful tutorials or wrappers for the YouTube Data APIs.

In case you missed the announcement, we recently added YouTube support into the Google Data Objective-C Library. Not long after, Dan Sinclair, wrote a few helpful tutorials about getting started building a YouTube app in Cocoa. Check 'em out here:

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

For the ActionScript 3 developers who want help querying and parsing Google Data feeds from Flash, Martin Legris wrote a small wrapper and also contributed an article to code.google.com on how to use it.

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

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

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

Google I/O

Hi everyone,

In case you haven't heard, we're holding our annual developer event,
Google I/O, on May 28-29th. Google I/O is a 2 day developer gathering in San Francisco
focused on how to build better web applications.

There are a few YouTube-specific sessions about building custom players, fully integrating YouTube into your site or app, and a codelab using the APIs and Python. The talks will led by Geoff, John, and Jochen respectively (check out the launch video to put some names to faces).

See the full list of sessions here:
http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions.html

Jeff, Ryan and I (you may recognize us from the forum) will also be there giving talks or helping out. Other Google engineers will be leading sessions and codelabs on a variety of topics, as well as hanging around booths to chat with you guys and answer questions.

You can register here:
https://www.weboom.com/sparks/google_io/forms/

Sign up early (or start
bugging your bosses to send you to the conference :). We hope to see you there!

For those of you can't make it to San Francisco, or are wondering what happened to Google Developer Day from last year, don't despair! We'll also be holding many Developer Days around the world (more info to come later).

Cheers,

Steph

YouTube / Picasa Web Albums APIs Hackathon at the 'plex

Hi everyone,

Hopefully, you've all had time to digest our last big announcement. If you don't know where to start with all the new functionality, and you're near Mountain View, CA (or like to travel!), we'll be holding a "media themed" hackathon with the YouTube and Picasa APIs at the Googleplex on Thursday, March 27th - just over a week from now.

We'll have intro sessions, as well as codelabs to get you started. If you've already dived into the docs, you can also stop by just to meet the team, ask questions, or find other developers to work on projects with.

There will be two sessions -- one from 3PM-6:30PM and another from 6:30 - 10PM. Feel free to stay the whole day, or just come for the session you have time for. Don't worry about food and caffeine -- we've got you covered.

Interested? RSVP here:
http://code.google.com/events/hackathons/ytpicasa.html



Hope to see you there!

Steph

Something to write home about

Hi everyone,

Since the initial YouTube Data API launch back in August, the team has been hard at work completing a whole suite of tools and features to make it possible for you to fully integrate YouTube into your sites and applications.

Here's the sound byte: We now support upload, other write operations, and internationalized standard feeds. (And there was much rejoicing!) We're also introducing player APIs and a chromeless player -- a barebones player SWF that's fully customizable and controllable using the player APIs. (Thus, closing out these five feature requests in the issue tracker.)

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

We've also released a new Terms of Service that you'll want to check out if you're going to use the API.

Read below for a little more detail, watch the team talk about what's new, or dive right into the documentation.



Authentication, Upload, and Other Write Calls

Two types of authentication are now available to allow your users to log into their YouTube accounts on your site. AuthSub (proxy auth for web applications) and ClientLogin (for installed applications). If you've used other Google Data APIs, this should be very familiar to you.

Now that you can authenticate users, that means your users can upload to YouTube, comment on videos, manipulate playlists, and more, all without leaving your site or app. Check out the protocol guide and the reference guide for all the gory details.

Internationalization

Wie geht's? Bonjour, comment allez-vouz? Come stai? You can now access internationalized feeds in the 18 domains that YouTube supports.

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

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

Player APIs and Tools

For the first time, we're giving you hooks inside the YouTube embedded player with the JavaScript API. Instead of a black box, you'll now be able to control the player (stop, play, mute, seek, etc.), access the state of the player (ie. playing, buffering, stopped), and see how far along the video is (how many bytes loaded, how far into the video).

If that's not enough control, we've also got the new chromeless player. You can add all of your own buttons and aesthetics to make YouTube fit in with your site, and control it with the player APIs.

Flash APIs are also available with identical calls if you want to load our player into your Flash app.

Check out my short tutorial video on this if you don't feel like reading through docs just yet.

Too overwhelmed with all the new possibilities? You might want to check out some case studies from some of our testers who have already integrated with YouTube.

Also, mark your calendars -- we're holding a YouTube/Picasa specific hackathon on March 27th at the Googleplex in Mountain View if you want to meet the team in person.

Phew! Okay, that was a lot to digest, so when you're ready, let us know what you think over at the developers forum. We can't wait to see what you guys build.


Cheers,

Stephanie Liu, on behalf of the whole team

Important Info That Could Affect You!

Hi everyone,

Starting today, we'll be pushing out some changes to the serving infrastructure in a limited rollout. Developers using our APIs and embedded players should not notice any issues -- but if you're using an unsupported method to get at YouTube content, you may start to see some intermittent problems with playback. If you fall into the latter category, I strongly encourage you to switch over to a supported way of accessing YouTube.

Get started by looking at our API documentation.

For Flash developers, you may have missed the fact that you can now make API calls directly from Flash/Flex apps. We recently put up a crossdomain.xml file on gdata.youtube.com (closing out this feature request in the issue tracker).

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

We hope this will make things easier for some of you! Having YouTube all over the web (and beyond) is one of our goals, so we want to help you as much as we can. The team is working on tools to give you more control over the YouTube experience on your site -- like a player API for the embedded player (star this issue in the tracker to receive updates on it).

As always, post any feedback or questions in the forum.

Cheers,

Steph

YouTube support added to PHP Client Library

Hi everyone,

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

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



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

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

Cheers,

Steph

Latest Changes to the API

Hi everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

<georss:where>
  <gml:Point>
    <gml:pos>28.61345863342285 -82.6171875</gml:pos>
  </gml:Point>
</georss:where>

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

Notable bug fixes:

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


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

Cheers,

Steph