Samsung Smart TV Play Youtube Video - youtube

Question

I'm making a Samsung Smart TV application. I need to play youtube videos.
Does anyone have any idea how to do this? I tried youtube js api but when the function playVideo() is executing the video just starts loading but not playing.
I have Samsung Smart TV 2012 so the SDK is 3.5

Answer 1

First of all check if your youtube video has granted access for mobile devices.
Second you have to disable advertisements on that video - as videos with advertisements doesn't work yet on TV devices.
Sometimes it takes a while after playVideo() to start playing the video, especially when you bind to some player events, so try to wait half or one minute.
If this won't help, please paste your code here - youtube embedding and your JS calls and I'll try to help.
EDIT
Try to use flash embedding like in Samsung docs.
As a movie parameter pass the src to YouTube API player:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" id="playerObject">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/apiplayer?&enablejsapi=1"></param>
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
</object>
And use this methods:
var ytPlayer = null;
function onYouTubePlayerReady() {
ytPlayer = document.getElementById('playerObject');
if (ytPlayer) {
ytPlayer.addEventListener('onStateChange','onChange');
ytPlayer.addEventListener('onError', 'onError');
ytPlayer.cueVideoById('i4iDWXstrWY'); //load video for play http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4iDWXstrWY
} else {
alert("error");
}
}
function onChange(newState) {
//Possible values are unstarted (-1), ended (0), playing (1), paused (2), buffering (3), video cued (5)
switch (newState) {
case 5:
ytPlayer.playVideo();
break;
}
function onError(errorCode) {
alert(errorCode);
}
When the player is ready, the API will call the onYouTubePlayerReady callback function. I think that in your solution you are missing the cueVideoById method. As it is said in YT API doc
Plays the currently cued/loaded video.

Answer 2

I really shouldn't be telling you guys this because you'll be able to make apps that compete with mine... but out of frustration with Samsung I will tell you: just host the darn thing as a webpage on a web server (using whatever YouTube API you like, or no API and just changing up the embed code on page load), control which video it plays using a querystring argument, then iFrame it into your Samsung Smart TV app. YouTube has severe embedding restrictions if you try and embed in an app that is not a web page... so stick in web page, then stick web page in app.
This is the general architecture you use for ANY in-app content on a Samsung Smart TV that needs to run in a web browser. The Samsung browser is blessed with being an HTML5 browser that also supports Flash. Samsung Smart TV apps allow IFraming of web content with absolutely no security restrictions. Put 2 and 2 together and you can pretty much do whatever you want on these glorified toasters... keeping in mind that you want to UNLOAD these IFrames (setting their SRC attribute to "" using JQuery is an adequate way to do this) when you change scenes because they do not unload themselves and these TVs have very little RAM.
Have fun guys :)