I know next to nothing about forums. Never really used them that much. But I’m hoping that adding forums to this blog will help the community support each other using videoMaru while I concentrate on adding features.

The main reason I added forums is because there has been an issue with videoMaru playing youTube vidoes. A few users have told me that they have solutions using PHP scripts to fix this problem. However, I don’t know much about PHP.

Therefore the first forum topic is about, wait for it, Using PHP and videoMaru together to display youTube videos. Together we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.

I 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:

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:

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.

Watch a video tutorial showing how you can stream youTube videos with video.Maru.

NOTE: youTube/Google have changed the process to get to the necessary query strings from the URL. The video tutorial above is inaccurate in the specific details of how to make this work but is still a good general overview of how it works. Just read the info below for the details of the changes.

I have made the necessary changes to video.Maru but streaming youTube videos only works with the latest build of video.Maru 3.0.

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:

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:

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.