Fix ( temporary ) for youTube streaming
October 21st, 2007 . by polyGeekI received a handful of emails and comments here at polyGeek.com telling me that youTube videos weren’t streaming through video.Maru any longer.
The good news is that I got it to work again, although it will takes a little more work to get the ID string. The bad news is that Google/youTube can change things around at any time and make it more difficult or impossible to stream their videos through video.Maru. If you are using this feature for your clients I’d be sure to have a backup in case if this happens again. Or should I say when it happens again.
You will need to use the new video.Maru 3.0 beta SWC to make this work.
Since making the change youTube has changed again and the fix doesn’t seem to be working. If the video below plays when you click the play button then it’s working. Otherwise youTube is messing around with things again. Use this feature at your own risk.
Here’s the new method of getting the ID string:
1 - Go to youTube and pick out the video that you want to stream through video.Maru.
You will get a URL that looks something like this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=IDstring.
2 - Edit the URL string by removing the word watch? And change the “=” sign to a “/”. Here is an example:
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3 - Now browse to that URL and you will get a very long URL and the video you were watching will appear in a large video interface. You need to grab two pieces of that new URL as illustrated below:
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4 - The string that you want to give to video.Maru in order to play a video is: youtube=SomeID&t=SomeLongString.
To play the video above would be: youtube=uCsdPszJLNQ&t=OEgsToPDskJK0D5QnoklN-REer7a0Cq2
You can use that in your XML or directly in your videoWindow or in a linkBtn.
Thanks to Abdul Qabiz’s Blog for figuring out the details on how to implement the changes.
Well what can I say, but this is so cool, the ease of it all is childs play. You myfriend are excellent, you have made my year. Keep up the excellent work. You sir rock.
will there a new fix for playing youtube videos? This fix doesnt seem to work.
@Abra, honestly I don’t plan on making any more fixes for this. Every time I change it youTube makes some adjustment. They obviously don’t want their videos being played like this and I don’t want to piss them off.
The source code for video.Maru is available. If you, or anyone, wants to take a crack at it I’m all for it. I’d even post it here if you wanted.
Here is a php page that has the current working id string in it.
Hmmm. The code didn’t show up. Well if anyone wants it, let me know.
http://www.datavamp.com/teresa/test2.php
Now I just need to get the php to write the xml. Is anyone good at php and can do this real quick? I’ll be very thankful :*
any chance with myspace videos?
@Antonio, sorry. I don’t know anything about MySpace videos. youTube videos has been a major pain in the ass. So I’m not likely to build in support for anything else.
However, take a look at the videoMaru API. It’s likely that if you can find the path to the videos you want to play you can use the API to play them.