Youtube is great and has a wealth of API's. On mobile, though, I just want simple playback. Up until around July 22, 2010, you could pass a url like this:
http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=6Yd5DQykZow&t=some_token&fmt=17
into an Android VideoView and it would play the video. This used progressive download meaning the video would play once it had buffered enough, then keep downloading as play progressed. It also provided very good quality, since fmt (format) controlled whether it was a low-bandwidth or high-bandwidth data connection. In case you are wondering, if on WiFi or Wimax, use high bandwidth. Then something changed and this type of url does not work anymore. I would love to know what happened. I suspect it was just too easy to download content from Youtube this way and save it to a file and go build your own site.
You still play videos a variety of ways on Android. Here are some options found by using the gdata API's for Youtube (see http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html)
Using this url
you get an XML feed about a given video. Here's the part relevant to playback:
<media:content url='http://www.youtube.com/v/6Yd5DQykZow?f=videos&app=youtube_gdata' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' medium='video' isDefault='true' expression='full' duration='322' yt:format='5'/>
<media:content url='rtsp://v1.cache8.c.youtube.com/CiILENy73wIaGQmMZqQMDXmH6RMYDSANFEgGUgZ2aWRlb3MM/0/0/0/video.3gp' type='video/3gpp' medium='video' expression='full' duration='322' yt:format='1'/>
<media:content url='rtsp://v3.cache4.c.youtube.com/CiILENy73wIaGQmMZqQMDXmH6RMYESARFEgGUgZ2aWRlb3MM/0/0/0/video.3gp' type='video/3gpp' medium='video' expression='full' duration='322' yt:format='6'/>
Format 1 = h.263, 5= flash video, and 6 = mp4. Formats 1 and 6 are low quality and meant for old cell phones on slow networks (176 x 144 resolution), but they work fine when passed to VideoView.setVideoURI(uri)
What's more interesting is the flash url (don't ask where html5 video comes in- I don't know). You can play this in a browser or in the Youtube application on HTC Hero and EVO and many more phones. Clicking the link will bring up the chooser for you to pick how to handle the video link. You don't need a VideoView; in fact, it won't work if you try one- go figure. Google is definitely having some struggle with all of this. Froyo (Android 2.2) will support flash, also, so lots of phones will work with the flash option.
There is still a question of quality of the playback- I want more control (i.e., flash video parameters for what I want) or the ability to give hints via SDP to the RTSP server, but no dice.
There is more mystery
This link
retrieves a different info feed entirely. It is all url-encoded name/value pairs, easy enough to decode and see that there are urls in it. In fact, you can download videos using them. The content type is flash, so if you download the video and save it as an *.flv file you could play the video with VLC (http://www.videolan.org)
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