YouTube API

Sadly, my plans for August don't include Drupalcon Szeged. Already too much travel this summer, and the dates conflict with a training my partner is doing, so that would be hard on our 4yo.

Back in June, I made a list of personal project plans, so I figure I'll revise that list for the rest of the summer.

First, the status report on the projects from June:

• I finished writing Drupal Multimedia! And we're about half way through the editing process. The book is scheduled to be published in September, and can be pre-ordered now.
• The Embedded Media Field port to Drupal 6 is still in process. It's ready for testing on new installations now, but I still need to write an upgrade path from Drupal 5.
• Morbus Iff and I have made strides with the engine for 5 Second Game. The module allows character creation and the combat engine is nearly ready for play.
• Except for some experimentation with audio metadata, I ended up not really working on GetID3. I'll probably end up waiting till the fall to work on this, unless I get new inspiration.
• I haven't written any tutorials yet, but hope to do that regularly once the book has been published and I have more free time available.

New projects of mine in progress and on the horizon:

• Media Player, which I've already blogged about a couple of times. This is an exciting project. Once it's mature, I plan to hook it into jQuery Media and Embedded Media Field for optional support as a start, and write patches for other media modules.
• I want to tie YouTube API into Embedded Media Field.
• More Drupal 6 upgrades, including Views Slideshow and a couple of other modules that need attention.
• Jump more into Drupal 7 development, especially for media handling, such as with the hook_file patch.
• Presenting at DrupalCamp NYC 5!

That's all for now.

I blogged briefly recently about YouTube's new and improved API. Soon thereafter, there was a flurry of discussion about creating a Google Summer of Code project to integrate it with Drupal, including a proposal that wasn't accepted, but I believe nothing further happened from that point.

Until now.

Brad Bowman (beeradb) has stepped up to the plate and created a YouTube API wrapper. He hasn't released it yet, though he indicated that he plans to early next week. I have had the honor of an early review, and it is nice to work with.

I set it up on a test server, and was able to upload a video to its file directory and have it also uploaded to YouTube, showing up in my user account almost immediately. The API also let me view my YouTube video user feed, so I could verify the results without leaving my site.

Additionally, when retrieving videos, you have access to everything stored at YouTube with that video, including video duration (as shown in the screen shot), description, and user comments.

Read on, anxious reader...