It took a long, long time but YouTube finally announced additions to their API that actually make it useful. With the release of the features listed below we’re about to see the floodgate open on third-party YouTube applications.
Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software
I hope someone combines this with the new iPhone SDK and makes a YouTube application for my iPod Touch that’s actually worth a damn.
It’s worth taking 45 minutes to watch this video of the guys from skinnyCorp giving a great presentation on the success of Threadless. It will probably be the most useful for people who run community driven sites, but there’s good advice in here for everyone.
This use of third-party tools not only saved them money but it also saved us all the time of going through video conversion which I can tell you from experience is a hassle.
We went live with our embedded Flash video yesterday on mudhens.com after some trials and tribulations. It turns out that my recommendation to use FFMPEGX for all your file converting needs wasn’t the best suggestion. We had a ton of framerate issues when trying to convert from MOV to FLV with FFMPEGX so we ended up finding something else.
Our final choice was a program called VisualHub. It chewed right through the MOV file that FFMPEGX couldn’t handle. The trial version of VisualHub will only convert up to two minutes of video but the registered version only runs $23.32 USD so it’s worth the price and then some.
One of my baseball clients is looking to post a lot of videos to their official site this season. In the past, we would periodically post WMV or MOV files to the site for fans to download. The new push for video this season requires us to move towards streaming Flash videos instead.
The video production guys on the team’s staff are a Mac crew so I had to come up with a way for them to convert their regular video files into Flash. Luckily, I stumbled upon the freeware program called FFMPEGX that they can use to convert their movies into FLV files. Once the movies are converted, they simply FTP the FLV file up to the webserver.
Now that the conversion details are out of the way I’m looking for a video player to embed on the site. Right now, I’m leaning toward using the Flash Video Player by Jeroen Wijering but I’m still scoping out other ideas too.
