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YouTube just announced some major extensions to their APIs (see official blog-post), which finally enable uploading of video to their site. seems like my own hack, PHPTube, is therefor rendered obsolete, and for good… :). the new API (see the developer guide) seems to allow both user-triggered authentication (similar to what Flickr has been doing for ages) and direct uploading (similar to PHPTube). there might still be a future for PHPTube though, if I ever find the time to adopt the new API. compared to PHPTube, implementation of the new API’s process-flow seems rather complicated, so there might be demand for a simple wrapper. we’ll see… for now, well done Google!

update: Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch points out what the new API basically means: Google offering YouTube as a (almost) whitelabel video-platform (”almost” since I guess videos will still be watermarked with the YouTube-logo)…

YouTube has added Google Maps-based geo-tagging of video-clips a few days ago. however, the geo-information is obviously not used anywhere on the site yet (it even doesn’t appear on the beta-version of the video-page, which is available to all users).

as a side-effect of this update, some commentators noticed that my video upload-API PHPTube has been broken by these changes. todays release 0.1.2 is fixing this issue, so I recommend anyone using PHPTube (and there are a few, according to this query for the included demo-video ) to upgrade.

Google finally released their own (there have been some more or less well-working rip-offs in the past) mobile version of YouTube at m.youtube.com! the mobile XHTML-application utilizes external video-player software for playback (Real Networks’ media-player in case of most current Nokia-phones). unlike Robert Scoble, who’s on a Nokia N95 going for 750,- USD, everything worked fine on my oldschool Nokia 6630 (after I’ve setup the default data-gateway in my Real Player, that is). naturally, YouTube’s rather poor video-quality translates quite well to the low-resolution screens of most mobile phones…the biggest catch however is, that YouTube currently doesn’t provide all videos on their mobile portal (long tail anyone?). otherwise, the stripped down XHTML-app works quite well - after opening the frontpage, I’ve got video playback started within a single click. I only wish the search-box would have been placed on top of the page, not at the bottom…

have you tried out m.youtube.com on your phone yet? shoot me a comment, and don’t forget to mention which phone you’re on…

YouTube’s API - basically a read-only set of RSS-feeds and XML/RPC-calls - currently doesn’t support scripted upload or download of videofiles. My quick hack PHPTube offers this featureset in a cleanly encapsulated PHP-class. Special interest goes to the upload-functionality, which virtually allows the integration of YouTube as a video-storage-backend into any other web-app. And while there are several download-scripts out there on the web, I’ve yet to find another uploader.

I’ve originally built PHPTube for using it within PLAY.FM (talking about automated upload of video-footage from our live radio-broadcasts), but since these things take some time I’ld love to hear if anyone out there has some use for my script…a simple digg would do as well

Warning: due to changes in the YouTube’s HTML, all versions prior 0.1.6 are obsolete!

Download: PHPTube 0.1.6 (fixed bug in getLast())
Requirements: PHP, PEAR/HTTP

Attention: If you’re looking for PEAR, goto http://pear.php.net/ and read http://pear.php.net/manual/en/installation.getting.php!

Ports: Java-port of PHPTube (by James Schopp), Python-Port (by Sylvain Boily), Joomla-Plugin (download-only, by Mohamad Ballouk) - thx!

Using PHPTube? Consider a donation, to keep things rolling…thanks!

one for the weekend…

ps: above you can see YouTubes revamped embedded video player in action…just click the ‘menu’-button!

Google Operating System has screenshots of the upcoming relaunch of YouTube’s flash-based video-player. although the embedded demo doesn’t work for me, it seems like the new player will feature cue-jumping to parts of the clip not yet downloaded as well as embedded thumbnail-preview of related clips.

Janko Röttgers, author of “Mix, Burn & RIP” (sort of german “standard” literature on the digital music revolution) wrote a Giga-OM-post on LastTube, another take on YouTube vs. Last.fm, questioning the economic eligibility of mashed up webapps. I had similar thoughts when Google released My Maps few weeks ago… like those niche mapping-apps’, last.tv & LastTube will probably be rendered obsolete once Last.fm is launching their original video-features. on the other hand, given the minimal investment required for most of these mashups, it’s probably only fair to leave financials aside and see them as fun projects which can at least help creative developers to get their name out there.

ps: btw, I had an interesting talk with a friend who’s currently doing an internship at a small independent label in Vienna - his job includes looping the label’s compilations all day long to push their artists within Last.fm

in the wake of lifecasting phenomenon Justin.tv launches uStream.tv, an amazingly simple, free broadcasting solution. think YouTube, only uStream is broadcasting live-footage. a flash widget is used to record audio & video from any webcam or firewire/USB camcorder. the stream can be watched either directly on uStream’s portal, or embedded into any other website (very much like an embedded YouTube-clip). furthermore, live-shows are recorded & archived for replay.

uStream virtually removes the barriere for live-casting audio- & video-content, a tedious task usually involving streaming-servers, encoding-formats and bandwidth-cost. not any more, it seems…

a major security-vulnerability in popular open-source blogging-tool Wordpress has been disclosed. Automattic responded immediatelly by releasing version 2.0.6, which takes care of the issues. might be a good hint for all users to subscribe to their developer-blog (I wonder if the hosted software at wordpress.com uses the same codebase and is/was therefor prone to the same exploits?).

TechCrunch.com added oldschool forum-functionality today. very minimalistic. I wonder how they’ll avoid cannibalization of their very own, charged-for, job-board?

btw., another tech job-board launched this week, can be found at Read/WriteWeb.

video-feed of Lawrence Lessig’s talk at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3), December 2006 in Berlin. quoting BoingBoing:

If you want to understand what computers do to culture and why the law is totally out of synch with that, watch this. I especially love that Larry describes why neither hacking nor lobbying will solve the problem — but sets out a strategy that will win, a real path to victory.”

since yesterday, podcast-indexing & speech-recognition service Podzinger allows users to search for keywords within YouTube-videos.

MobVendor is a SecondLife vending-machine, that adjusts product-prizes to the number of people avatars near the point-of-sale - the more avatars, the lower the price. 3pointD has the lowdown on crowdpricing in SecondLife.

with Quick Capture, YouTube has been adding a very interesting feature to their service recently. Quick Capture allows users to record & upload videos straight from their website, without the need of using any additional editing-software. by capturing any connected (web-)cam through a flash-applet, this feature greatly reduces friction in contributing online-video. my guess is, that Quick Capture isn’t primarily aimed at original content creators (those will miss editing-features - which on the other hand could quite easily be integrated later, in a Jumpcut-kind of way), but at people wanting to create instant video-comments on existing clips. YouTube could further support that usage, f.e. by automatically cueing up all video-comments after the original video. however, Quick Capture will certainly accelerate the growth rate of YouTube’s video-stock. plus, it’s simply fun

The second feature introduced is currently only available in YouTube’s beta-sandbox, TestTube. Streams allows users to cluster related video-clips on a topic on a single page. other users can join any existing Stream, contribute their clips into the public cue and exchange chat-messages in realtime. as far as I understand, video isn’t played back synchronously among all participating users, which for me kills the most interesting aspect - watching & chatting about the exact same image-frames as my peers - of Streams. however, by implementing synchronous playback, I think Streams could really become a very hot trend in “social video consumption”…  (via TechCrunch’s Arrington, who wasn’t to fascinated by Streams either).