Tag Archives: YouTube

YouTube subscriptions and podcasts

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I’ve whipped together a small experimental piece of web code that you log in to via OpenID/OAuth hybrid protocol using your Google Account (meaning I have no access to your password), and grab URL for an RSS feed. This RSS feed contains your YouTube account’s newest subscribed videos, and links to video files in addition to what Google ordinarily provides: link to video’s web page and link to embedded player. Purpose? Getting subscriptions as a podcast in iTunes or Miro.

However, sadly, this will probably never see the the light of day (and probably I’m not supposed to use it) because of annoying restriction in YouTube API ToS: they don’t access to videos except through embedded player or via their web. This is understandable, for podcasting involves downloading a copy of entire video, and YouTube/Google doesn’t want you to copy the videos (in fact, API specifically prohibits storing the videos, too).

Perhaps they wouldn’t care about my own personal use, but it looks like publicly announcing availability of this small service would not be welcome by Google. Well, something good out of it: at least I now have PHP 5.3 compatible PHP-OpenID library with OAuth extension, and a framework for OpenID-only login.

PS Happy New Year +1 day :-)

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Narrowminded engineers, interesting composition

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It has become a nice industry practice to support browsers other than Internet Explorer. Namely Mozilla Firefox. Yet, since Mozilla is also evil, and its browsers don’t integrate as neatly as some other browsers, and its browsers are having speed/memory deficiencies, I am also using Opera and Konqueror. Opera is much faster and a bit less memory hungry in most cases. Konqueror neatly integrates with KDE. (Anyone knowing me knows that I tend to switch between GNU/Linux desktop managers, so my use of Konqueror is surely not constant.)

While Opera seems to work pretty nicely, I am disturbed by the fact that there are numerous issues with many Google’s services when used in Konqueror. Let me just remind you that Konqueror uses KHTML. Safari also uses KHTML (or at least some part of it). It’s nice to know that Blogger‘s rich textbox is completely uneditable with Konqueror. Google Groups don’t have a functioning reply button. Gmail is opened in the old-looking HTML-only interface, intended for text-mode browsers such as Links, or otherwise limited browsers.

QA rings so loudly.

YouTube is also very interesting:

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

Since I’m very annoyed when people are narrow-minded, especially engineers at companies such as YouTube/Google, let me point out the other possible causes:

  • I have never installed Flash player, so I don’t have an old version either!
  • I have turned off Netscape plugins in browser options (namely Konqueror) since they (namely Flash) were causing browser to crash

It’s the second thing.

And while at YouTube, make sure you listen to John Cage’s composition called 4″ 33′. It’s enlightening and inspiring.

[This is syndicated content. Read my blog at http://blog.vucica.net/ - please also leave comments there ]