I have been using the YouTube API Video Feeds for a while and it amazes me how it allows you to search and filter your query way beyond what the YouTube website allows. For example, how do you search for most discussed videos from the comedy category on YouTube? How about, most popular comedy videos from Brazil? I love the YouTube UI but I really think that they need an advanced search function that will allow you to create any kind of query that you can easily create with their API or feeds service. The best part is that you don’t even need an API key to do this because YouTube does not require one for these calls. Let’s take a closer look.
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Have you ever wanted to easily grab an image from a youtube video and save the screenshot to your computer? After reading a blog post on drawing video frames into the canvas element I wondered if this concept could be extended for YouTube videos. If I save a YouTube video using a chrome extension and then load the video locally it works perfectly, but the whole idea is to be able to do this without downloading the video first.
So, first of all, we need to somehow load YouTube’s actual video files into the HTML5 video tag. At first, I tried using a call to YouTube’s get_video_info script (http://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=VIDEOID) via a simple php proxy and this did give me lots of different video urls based on quality and formats for a particular YouTube video. Unfortunately, this only worked when I was testing on my own machine. The video urls failed to work on my web server.
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