YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: YouTube Direct for Mobile, and Other Updates

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

YouTube Direct for Mobile, and Other Updates

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Since launching YouTube Direct last November, our team has been hard at work adding new functionalities, fixing bugs, and answering developer's questions. We wanted to take a momentary break from all that to share some updates.Separate from but related to the main YouTube Direct project are two other Google Code projects: video capture and YouTube Direct upload applications for the Android and iPhone operating systems. These two projects are basic implementations that we hope will inspire organizations to add video capture and YouTube Direct upload functionality to their Android or iPhone applications.We've been gradually, and quietly, checking in various bug fixes and enhancements to the current release's Subversion repository on Google Code. One recent change is especially important, as it adds support for the new video page URLs that will start becoming more common. Periodically, we package the current release into a new "tagged" release, and generate release notes summarizing what's new. If you haven't updated your YouTube Direct codebase recently, we strongly suggest that you read the release notes and perform a sync with our code repository. Starting with the next YouTube Direct release, we will send email announcements to the low-traffic, announce-only Google Group. We recommend that all developers using YouTube Direct sign up to the group — actually, all YouTube API users should sign up to receive periodic important notifications.Many organizations, in addition to our launch partners, have deployed YouTube Direct on their websites since our launch, and we wanted to highlight a few here.Gannett rolled out a company-wide initiative in honor of Black History month, in which they ask people to interview civil rights heroes via video. Al-Jazeera invited the community to share their thoughts and experiences around Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrammage to Mecca. And if you have news videos around any of the big stories of the day, ITN News wants them. Even Tufts University is using YouTube Direct to solicit personal videos from the community called "You, in One Minute".As always, the best resource for developers looking to embed YouTube Direct functionality on their website is our Getting Started Guide. If you have any technical questions about YouTube Direct, our YouTube API Developer's Google Group is the place to turn.Cheers,-Jeff Posnick on behalf of the YouTube Direct Team