Embedded Youtube video player vs html5/flash video player in web application - youtube

Many web application which have videos to show. For example The New Boston uses the embedded Youtube player. Is there any advantage using embedded Youtube video player over implementing our own.

Pros:
No need to pay for hosting and content delivery
Allows for quickly bootstraping new ideas
Youtube makes content much more discoverable. Users watching similar content will be recommended your content as well. In this way they can find about your service.
Cons:
No way to differentiate between paying and non-paying customers. What if you want to offer premium content to your paying customers?
Youtube takes the lions share of any advertising revenue.
No UI customization.
Sometimes youtube censors things they don't want for whatever reason.
If your website offers its users to leave comments or a "like" button then users may get confused over which comments to use - the ones in youtube or the ones in your website.
Support for live broadcasting is a not as good.

The main advantage to using the youtube player is that you have access to their servers to stream the video as opposed to whatever hosting server you are using. Realistically you have the same control over how it appears within the page either way. Just keep in mind you will need to deliver multiple file types if you go the HTML5 video tag route.

Related

YouTube Analytics vs YouTube Data API Discrepancy

I've been using the YouTube Analytics API (I'm using the Java library), to retrieve analytics data for a YouTube Channel - I've been filtering the API calls to specific videoIDs.
However the data for the same date range, when I look in YouTube Analytics (the web interface) seems to differ.
Data from the YouTube Web Interface:
Data from the API:
Does anyone have an explanation for this ?
It says from this SO post that it is an intended behavior of both the API and the Youtube Analytics web interface.
To support this similar post, based from the documentation - How video views are counted:
If you're looking at a video you uploaded, you can monitor your views
more closely using YouTube Analytics. However, keep in mind that the
Realtime report only shows estimates of potential view activity and
might not match the number you see on the watch page.
Also, there are called Frozen View Count where on some videos, the view count might seem frozen or not show all the views that you expect. Video views are algorithmically validated to maintain fair and positive experiences for content creators, advertisers, and users. To verify that views are real and accurate, YouTube may temporarily slow down, freeze, or adjust the view count, as well as discard low-quality playbacks.

Patterns between YouTube m. and normal site urls

My site is not able to show uploaded youtube videos when the url is a mobile (m.) site, but it works for the normal youtube site. It seems to me that the mobile and normal urls differ in a pattern, as shown below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ILbPFSc4_4
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=5ILbPFSc4_4&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D5ILbPFSc4_4
obviously, the m. is added, as is the /#, and all the &desktop_uri... stuff.
and again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=9To-6VIJZRE&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D8To-6VIJZRE
What we hope to do is check to see if the url is mobile site, and if it is, parse it so it shows as the normal site.
Does any one know if all youtube urls work this way--if this similar pattern works for all the same videos on mobile and normal sites?
In general, any time you attempt to parse URLs for sites (as opposed to web APIs) by hand, you're leaving yourself open to breakage. There's no "contract" in place that states that a common format will always be used for watch page URLs on the mobile site, or on the desktop site.
The oEmbed service is what you should use whenever you want to take a YouTube watch page URL as input and get information about the underlying video resource as output in a programmatic fashion. That being said, the oEmbed response doesn't include a canonical link to the desktop YouTube watch page, so it's not going to give you exactly what you want in this case. For many use cases, such as when you want to get the embed code for a video given its watch page URL, it's the right choice.
If you do code something by hand, please ensure that your code is deployed somewhere where it would be easy to update if the format of the watch pages ever do change.

Stream Videos Online and Access Rights

I have a web application that i have developed in RoR 2.1. In the app, users have the privilege of uploading media files. Currently, only FLV videos can be streamed online since i have given FLV player browser support.I have used the gem Mime Types to identify the file fomats of the media files being uploaded.
I would like to get the feasibility and ways to implement two new requirements
How can i stream all videos being uploaded online? Should I convert these files to flv or
is there any other way of making it possible?
I want the users who upload the videos to set a privilege (count) of how many users can
stream this video on line at a given time. How can i implement this?
1) for streaming you should use a CDN, this should not be the responsibility of your rails app. Lots of options, I have enjoyed working with S3/Cloudfront. Streaming through your app will really hurt the scalability of your platform. Lets the good folks at the CDN deal with this.
2) To throttle the usage -- I would do the following. When a web user wants to watch a video give them a link you your app (vs directly to the CDN) so http://myapp/video/watch. In that method(VideosController#watch) you can count concurrent views, and if under the threshold then perform a secure redirect to the video.
If you must serve files directly from your server use send_file method (doc)
If you are looking for video playback, there a bunch of javascript/html5 video solutions: VideoJS is a pretty good one: http://videojs.com/, It should be able to handle many different types of video formats
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Good luck

Youtube player for multiple videos from various accounts

I have a page that has many videos on it and the page has become so slow it is unusable. These are all Youtube videos and I changed to the new iFrame tags hoping that would help the loading. I need a solution to make this page more useable.
I would be happy if I could just pull a frame from the video and display that, when clicked it would load the video. Or I would be happy with a multi-video player. The custom play from Youtube will not work because the videos I am serving are not all from my account and as I understand the custom player you reference a group from your account. I have also considered using AJAX to load the iframe, which would be okay too if I could figure out how to get a thumbnail of the video to show as a link.
Ideas and suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance for any ideas.
YouTube API is made up of 2 different sets - one for the player and one for the data.
You can start here ...
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html
... then click on "Data API" link and after looking over that page, click on the "Reference Guide" link.
In essence, the gData API will allow you to get videos in numerous ways (feeds, channels, tops, etc) in chunks of up to 100 videos at a time, using a startIndex (or whatever it may be called) option for paging. What you get is an XML document with parts or everything that YT has about a video, including not one but several different thumbnail images.
HTH helps you and/or another Web 0.2 Fellow (like me)

How to add YouTube videos to watching queue?

I have a list of youtube video links on a page. I want to let user mark interesting ones, programatically add them to a watching queue, and then forward a user to YouTube where they can watch all those videos in sequence. Is it possible?
I dont think youtube has a feature to access yt quicklist etc, but you can easily do it with youtube javascript api, if is it ok that the videos gonna be played inside your site.
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/js_api_reference.html
Embed a youtube player with js api in your site, then you can make a simple js array for queue.
If this solution is ok for you, i gonna write some more details about it, if you're interested in.

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