Embedding videos played a huge role in YouTube’s success. These days you can programmatically embed a video in both a web page and your own Flash application. YouTube released its player API back in March, but was missing examples for Flash developers.
The example also includes the JavaScript API, for an all-in-one demo. For more information on the JavaScript version, read our YouTube API tutorial, which shows how to embed and control the chromeless player in your page with JavaScript.
YouTube announced V2 of its API, and with it the option to search based on location. Users uploading videos have been able to add geotags for over a year, and they’ve been viewable by location in Google Earth for almost as long. There hasn’t been a way for others to access the location data until now.
To implement location search, there are two new parameters, location and location-radius, in the search API. You can find out more in the YouTube API reference.
YouTube also added versioning to its API, and dubbed this new release version 2. Providing the option to bake the version number into API calls means that applications written on top of the API shouldn’t break. Though the YouTube API will move forward, code you write today should still work. In other words, YouTube is preparing for backwards compatibility.
If you’ve written something using the previous YouTube API, you probably ought to toss v=1 into the parameters. On the other hand, if you’re new to all this, check out our YouTube Data API tutorial.
Apparently the developers at YouTube read web comic xkcd. Before posting a comment on the video sharing site, users now have the option to hear their words in text-to-speech, a feature suggested in a recent installment of the popular online strip.
YouTube comment threads are well known for what could be kindly called “lacking coherence.” There’s even a Firefox extension to remove misspelled comments. Now the site has decided to let users hear for themselves how little sense they make.
Whether “audio preview” will make any difference to someone whose entire comment reads “rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” (actual comment from a featured video) is to be seen. I’m guessing most commenters will skip right past it in an effort to get their “first!” comments in there.
The placement of the button is interesting. It’s exactly where the post message button used to be, meaning quick commenters will discover it only when they accidentally click the new button. Hopefully they’ll do this with their speakers up at work.
No word yet from YouTube on the official blog, but it caused at least one user to suspect a virus.
Google Desktop became more than just a hard drive search tool and widget provider Thursday when it included a Media Server plug-in to its software offering.
The Media Server software allows you to choose which of your media files already indexed by Google Desktop to stream. It also allows you to tie in your online photos from your Picasaweb account and any videos that appear in your YouTube channel. The media can then be streamed directly within your network to your media playing device.
Google Media Server is for Windows only and works as an add-on, or gadget, to the Google Desktop application. The gadget appears as a small window with only an on/off switch and a preference button. The admin interface is run through a local web host and can be controlled through your primary browser. Turn it on and Google will host a local server on your computer for access by any Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) device. UPnP devices include media players, picture frames and game systems including Playstation 3.
Xbox 360 is excluded in the list because of a unfriendly restriction it has with non-Microsoft products. Hackers have already described how you can trick Google’s Media Player to show up on the game system.
Google’s previous foray into streaming online content to the TV was a deal with DVR manufacturer and software provider Tivo. The deal allowed Picasaweb users to stream their online photos through Tivo’s DVR interface.
Embedding videos played a huge role in YouTube’s success. These days you can programmatically embed a video in both a web page and your own Flash application. YouTube released its player API back in March, but was missing examples for Flash developers.
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