how to play youtube videos in flowplayer Created Apr 1, 2009

This is against Youtubes TOS

Thanks,
Liam

It is against youtube

Education Grants

Can I lose my adsense account due to violation of youtube TOS?

yes there is a higher possibility of it

Yes, you may loose your adsense account. Better to be safe than sorry....

What you're doing now is clever enough, and doesn't (in my opinion) go against YouTube's TOS, since you're merely embedding a video that they allow you to emed. You're simply replacing one video player over the other in the same DIV space.

On edit: As long as you don't cover up their player after it starts I think that's okay. And while you begin with another player running an ad, YT's TOS against advertising is if the site is primarily set up to gain advertising and/or compete with YouTube. It's the number of ads and the amount of embedded videos that generally gets the ire of YouTube. Of course, YMMV, and this is something you do have to be mindful about.

As far as I understand YouTube policies it is not permitted to play youtube videos directly with another player- you need to use a "chromeless" player for that

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/chromeless_example_1.html

which is basically a video screen with YouTube branding. That is how you do it legally. It is technically possible to stream YouTube videos directly with Flowplayer but we don't have the courage to place such demos on our site.

"but we don't have the courage to place such demos on our site."
ROFL. Nice...

I'd have to agree with gmccomb. I don't see how YouTube could really complain about what you're doing. I think so long as you leave their videos in their player, you're good to go.

Just curious, why not disable the controls on the ad? Do you want people to be able to skip it? It's very easy to remove them with controls:null. Here's a demo:



HTML setup for the player

<!-- include latest Flowplayer javascript file -->
<script language="javascript" src="path/to/flowplayer-3.2.8.js"></script>

<!-- player container with optional splash image -->
<a href="path/to/video_file" id="playerContainer">
	<img src="path/to/splash_image" />
</a>

JavaScript coding

Following script will install Flowplayer into our player container

<script language="javascript">
// our custom configuration is given in third argument
flowplayer("playerContainer", "path/tohttp://releases.flowplayer.org/swf/flowplayer-3.2.11.swf",{
plugins:{controls:null}
});
</script>

YouTube's TOS has some really Draconian limitations on how your site attempts to leverage ads against their video content. Since Google loses about $1.5M a day on YouTube, they don't want you do make any money either!

When I visited the site pointed to in the original post I didn't feel the video was all about driving users to the site just to be exposed to ads - ad-centric pages is what YT is against. There were a lot of value-added aspects to the page.

I haven't found a tube site TOS as strict as YT. Even Hulu.com (US only) with its full TV episodes, doesn't restrict embedding their player into pages that are basically filled with ads.

-- Gordon

>As far as I understand YouTube policies it is not permitted to
>play youtube videos directly with another player- you need to
>use a "chromeless" player for that

I haven't seen that specifically in the YT TOS, but I admit not to have studied it extremely closely. YT goes overboard in what they allow/don't allow, but I guess it's necessary to stem the huge losses they have every day due to file storage and bandwidth.

Here's a good page on the chromeless player, and how to use an AS3 wrapper around their antiquated API. Their demo is a bit more polished, but it has some issues.

http://otoh.typepad.com/on_the_other_hand/2008/06/embed-the-youtu.html

Gordon

>As far as I understand YouTube policies it is not permitted to >play youtube videos directly with another player- you need to >use a "chromeless" player for that

This is not 100% true... You need the YouTube branding, but not the ugly chromeless player... Checkout http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/
scroll down to support....

This is one of the most popular flash video players, and it runs youtube directly in its player using the supplied YouTube API.

If you search their forums there are even some discussions on the exact legalities of the topic.

The YouTube "chromeless player" is a set of APIs. It doesn't have an appearance of its own; that's the idea. The example coding pages show a pretty ugly representation, but that's not the player, simply a programmer's demo of what you can do with the APIs. Everything is done using either JavaScript or ActionScript. You are supposed to provide the UI.

YouTube's SWF infrastructure is based on ActionScript 2, which Flowplayer is not written in (it's written in AS3), but apparently the JW player is, so it's ready to go out of the box for playing YT videos through the "chromeless player" APIs.

I don't think YouTube or Google cares if you play their videos through another SWF player - JW or Flow otherwise - as long as you observe their rules regarding blocking their branding, and especially you are not allowed to place ads over the content. (You can place a logo as long as it doesn't interfere with YouTube's.)

Since you can control the video playback with just JavaScript, it's possible to make a player with just that, and no extra SWF player, like they show on the page Tero provided. You'd have to work out the UI aspects, like sliders for the seek bar and volume, pretty buttons for Play, Stop, and so on.

Elsewhere on the Web there's an example of showing how to integrate an ActionScript 3 SWF with the YouTube API, using some type of wrapper. The demo had problems, but if someone were so inclined, it would be one way of getting Flowplayer to play YouTube videos.

As far as I can see, since YT's TOS forbids you from exploiting their videos for advertising (on or around the player), you're pretty much limited to just putting your logo into a corner of the screen. I'm not sure it's worth all the hassles it for just that.

Gordon

I am aware that the "chromeless player" is an API reference demo, I was kinda referring to the fact that people in this forum seem to be speaking about it as though its some sort of licenced player which is the only thing you can play YT videos through.

As you just stated, there is no rule about needing to play youtube videos through the "CHROMELESS PLAYER" (what i take this to mean is that people on this thread think you need to use the unaltered source from the demo pages on your website if you want to play youtube vids). Instead you are to use the provided API demonstrated in "chromeless" version, to let YOUR unique player interact with YouTube content.

Regarding AS3 -- JW Player is programmed in AS3 as of version 4.0... Prior versions were done in AS2 but the AS2 & AS3 versions both have youtube functionality. I believe there is substantial documentation on the page as to how this is all done. You can download the source too.

As far as branding is concerned, having a watermark of your own on a video, or having advertisements play within your player are not imperative functions to playing video in many web situations. Your website is already your branding. Playing a video within your website sometimes negates the need for further branding of the actual video (the fact that it is playing directly from your webpage is good enough).

I'm not saying that having ads/watermarks within the player is useless, but there are many cases where it is not required.

Having optional youtube functionality is at least as important to a FLV player as optional watermarking/ad running because YouTube can function as a free CDN for lower budget web projects (indie film makers, bands who host their own website, etc), delivering content that can be played back directly from their website without incurring the associated costs.

> Playing a video within your website sometimes negates
> the need for further branding of the actual video
> (the fact that it is playing directly from your
> webpage is good enough).

The idea is to allow playing (and spreading your brand) from ANY Website. To wit:

YouTube adds their logo specifically because they allow embedding on other sites. You want to allow embedding AND increase the footprint of your own brand. The idea of viral videos is that you don't necessarily require people to go to your Web site; having "passive" branding in this way is easier for other sites to agree to, and therefore you get more exposure.

If you require a whole link just to see your video fewer sites are going to go along. They want to keep surfers on their site as much as you want them to stick around yours.

Unless your video is really popular and eats up a lot of bandwidth I really don't see the point in giving the branding op to YouTube (though this is precisely what Google wants you to do). Cheap hosting with 100G or more of monthly transfer is pretty common. For <$20 a month you host your own videos and keep ALL the control and don't have to deal with YouTube's baloney TOS.

(That said, I think most people embedding a YT video into another player do it because they think it looks cool. YT's TOS is so restrictive in how you can monetize a site with their videos that in the end it's not a route I think most people will stick with.)

I DO agree that being able to play YT videos through Flowplayer would be nice added feature for some sites, but for business, I have to question the model. As a player for the pros, maybe Flowplayer dev time (since it's not a large staff) ought to go to features that more people would use.

Gordon

Nicely put Gordon ;)
YouTube's baloney TOS -chuckle

As for hosting (being your own boss mode) some great offerings from linode, slicehost and Mosso all for 20USD or less.
Regards
Kb

You guys certainly know what you're talking about. I was looking for few information on this forum and so far I'm not disappointed. Thanks

You can't play youtube video in another player.