YouTube API
I am very interested in using the YouTube API for my tentative final project idea (or possibly just a site I want to create in the future. I envision a site a that is modeled after the old TV Guide Channel / Prevue channel from the 90’s.
Remember this?
I envision a site that would function as a music blog with a really cool layout. I would reach out to my network of musicians I know that I want to promote on the site. They would obtain a channel where they can choose the programming for 24 hours in a day with content such as youtube videos, mp3 from soundcloud, or visual art. Depending upon what time of day you visit the site different options will be available to view by clicking on the “show”. The video or media would then take over the top half of the screen.
The YouTube API would be crucial because of its ability to Use an embedded player to play videos directly in your app and customize the playback experience. You can automatically play videos using the autoplay parameter or cause a video to play repeatedly using theloop parameter which would be useful for “commercials” for the content in the site. The API also features quality options which could be useful for functionality and speed. The ability to seek ahead in the video will be useful for commercials. There are options to shuffle playlists.
Currently I do not see any restrictions that would get in the way of my idea, however I still am not certain on how exactly I will make this in totality.
The great news is YouTube has an insanely high limit. Projects that enable the YouTube Data API have a default quota allocation of 1 million units per day, an amount sufficient for the overwhelming majority of the API users.
Google provides detailed information about the security of the API. I have to do more investigation but I currently don’t see any issue that would arise.
The core mode of the api is the <iframe> which allows more flexibility and usability than flash.
Soundcloud API
The ultimate goal of my project is to create a web app that which purpose is to expose people to new music the way a tastemaker music blog would. However instead of articles and blog posts that promote and describe the music my site will gather attraction based off of the novelty of the website to keep people coming back for more. Many of the artists I plan on featuring on the site use Soundcloud as their main hub for streaming music. The ability to create custom widgets that will fit my split screen is what mainly interests me. To pull cover art and choose the dimensions will help my site tremendously. Soundcloud provides a nice Widget API too to help customize the look and functionality of the music players. It is very easy to use and also works as an <iframe> element.
I looked over some youtube videos and saw that sometimes the API can give results that are not great. Things like missing cover art worry me. The documentation seems to say that everything should work correctly however.
The Soundcloud rate limit of 15,000 is much smaller than YouTube’s however still within a totally reasonable amount. I don’t suspect that this should be a problem.
The core modes would be audio, cover art, and track information that would be gathered from implementing this API into my site.
An interesting development will be to see what happens to Soundcloud in the near future since it was purchased by Twitter last month. I expect big upgrades in this API over the next year. I look forward to that because I plan on keeping this site up to date after being built instead of static. Some cross development with the Twitter API could be interesting.
Vimeo API
Get acquainted with the new Vimeo API. It’ll be the best decision you’ve ever made. It won’t make your lunch or clean your bathroom but just about anything else is possible with the Vimeo player.
Vimeo has a great API and is my preferred method for streaming music videos. My band Vensaire prefers to have our videos on Vimeo to YouTube based on the quality it yields.
I am very intrigued by the possibilities of featuring vimeo videos. More artists will be on YouTube than Vimeo however so both must be implemented in. The ability to pull data from the videos and the slick simplistic interfacing options are very appealing to what I am trying to accomplish.
Vimeo has a rate limit of 7,500 per hour rather than a daily limit. Again totally reasonable.
I worry about performance with Vimeo however as the videos are less compressed than YouTube. I hope that I can utilize it as much as possible but understand that it may not be as practical. Vimeo points out in it’s best practices document that best performance comes with caching data as much as possible.
We ask that you cache data whenever possible. In general, don’t call the API on every page load. Instead, call the API independently and load from cache on each page load. Some caching is better than no caching!
I found an interesting github that unifies the Vimeo, YouTube, and Dailymotion iframe API’s. http://jquery-video.dachcom.ch/demo/ This could be useful to my project if I need multiple videos at once.
