I'm using the YouTubePlayerFragment to show YouTube videos on Android and the ads that are associated with them, but I have observed some wierd behaviour.
It used to work fine on several devices (ads appeared) but not on others : the video player would work fine to play/pause video, but ads would never appear.
Today, after building and debugging the same code, I noticed that the ads that used to appear on my device do not appear anymore! And my code hasn't changed...
Do you have any idea what this could be linked to? Could this be linked to the developer API key I am using for development (limited number of requests for a certain device)?
Cheers
It is not in the control of developer whether the ads have to be shown or not. It is in control of the content owner of that video, developer is just using the API to fetch the video. This issue is not related to the device or YouTube API or the API key.
If you are the content owner of the YouTube videos that are been displayed on your YouTube Player via YouTubePlayerFragment then one thing you could have done is to upload copies in your own account, and then ensured that your account was set up with monetization turned off, then that would prevent ads from showing during playback. It's up to you to work out that arrangement/permission with the original videos' owners. But since you have not mentioned any of this I am assuming its just the behavior that is intermittent. You will be able to see ads after a while.
Related
I am trying to integrate an HTML 5 video player with It's auto-play attribute on my site. It is working fine on Web and other devices but it is not working with any android device which has 4.0 and above OS. I have seen this Link.But I am looking if there is any workaround for this issue.
Note:I have also tried implementing jwplayer but later on I found that it doesn't support the autoplay for android and ios devices.
PS : I have tried to put an image on top of video and clicking on that should trigger an autoplay but still no success.
The only approach I know of is to provide a user interaction before the video begins to play like a 'touch to enter site' button, then on that event play the video. Playing video or audio in HTML5 requires user interaction on Android and iOS. It is by design - no workaround as of today is available. You can read here for confirmation.
You can read here for the whys and hows on iOS (which is the same info as on your Google link).
So, this is an extremely bad bug for my app.
I have an app that basically relies on videos to autoplay, but the YouTube API wont let you autoplay if they randomly choose to inject an ad first in the video.
I have tried lots of workarounds and eventually I found a half solution, that sort of works. If I detect no sound playing after some interval, I keep trying other videos... which then at some point wont have ads.
Does anyone know of a way to autoplay videos through the YouTube API when ads appear first?
You can see the player live here:
www.stateofpsychosis.com/media/
The viewable player is a custom player. The default SC player has been shrunk down to a 1x1px iframe so it can't be seen without using the developer tools to make changes to the style.
This is only a problem on Chrome for Android
For some reason I can't get the API to actually play the music. The Previous/Next buttons work in the sense that they query and change the info, but they won't play the song either. It does however change the default SoundCloud widget play button to a pause button. It changes the track info. But it just won't actually make any noise. If I make the widget viewable and push anything in the default player (as opposed to the custom one), it seems to work though.
I too, am facing the same issue.
It seems that Chrome for Android restricts the ability to trigger HTML5 audio playing. This is to protect users from extra data usage on their phones. It seems that triggering the audio to play from a script is not allowed.
You can read more about the issue
here
Hopefully they lift this restriction in the near future.
Is there anyway to bypass the blocked videos on mobile? First I tried to fire up normal youtube intent, then I used WebView (using both video and iframe tags), and lastly I changed the user agent of WebView to a desktop client but none of the above mentioned way worked. I tried rtsp to stream the video using VideoView but it would only give me a low quality 3gp video, which is what Youtube API gives.
I am running out of options. Any help would be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
I ran into the same thing with some of our videos on YouTube and found out that only YouTube controls if it will be allowed to show on a mobile. We never found a work-around for it other than hosting the video on our server or using Vimeo. But as it stands,YouTube has control over mobile viewing. Also do you have that video monetized? Monetizing a video on YouTube can also cause them to not allow it on mobile especially if it has any content that YouTube is saying is a Third Party or Copyright infringement. They told us we had third party content when it was all shot by us. Further reading in that problem showed that YouTube's new digital fingerprint is the main culprit for creating a new wave of problems for users trying to upload their own videos they made and own. i.e., a user tried to upload a video of his backyard with birds in it and the birds were singing. When he tried to upload it, YouTube said it was Copyrighted! How do you Copyright bird chirps everyone is now asking!
So try Vimeo or use your own server to deliver the content. Sorry I can't offer more help.
I remember being able to bypass the block as a user by asking the desktop version of the YouTube site and then watching the video with the (not updated anymore) Flash Player for Android. So maybe you could try pretending to be the Flash Player when asking for the video from your app. Maybe use a network sniffer to see what it's doing.
User "OMA" gave an answer (use 'Desktop Mode'), that sometimes works and is easy to try.
Next up is this Site (or a similar one): http://www.mobileyt.com/ which accepts an URL, then shows your Video.
A Proxy Server might assist you with access, particularly if it is a 'Country Restriction' (for Mobile, but does not mention the Country Restriction only the Mobile one). Any ADs served to that Country may be poorly received (Language / Customs); so it is blocked.
You can try a Spoofing Application for your Mobile Browser (Hint: Spoof you Browse with the Opera Browser OR use Explorer 10 on WinXP they won't be ready for that).
Combining those techniques can assist in difficult cases. You can also resort to downloading the Video and playing it with MX Player or VLC (for Mobile).
Good luck, and if at first you don't succeed ...
In my Android app I'd like the user to tap an image once, have a youtube video play automatically and when the video is done the user is immediately returned to the app. What's the best way to do this in Android?
I tried using intents. This works in that the video comes up on what I think is a youtube web page. However playing the video requires another tap. I'd like to avoid this if possible.
I tried the whole MediaPlayer, prepareAsync, setOnPreparedListener and never got it to work. For some reason onPrepared was never called. No exceptions were thrown. I'm using the emulator to test and I'm new to Android so I'm not sure if the behavior will be different on physical devices.
I got this working well on iOS by getting creative with webviews. I'm hoping it's more straightforward on Android. The docs sure make it sound straight forward.
Cheers!
Update: Everything below is still correct, but the official YouTube API for Android is now available.
By far, the easiest way to play a YouTube video on Android is to simply fire an Intent to launch the native Android YouTube app. Of course, this will fail if you are not on a certified Google device, that doesn't have the complement of Google apps. (The Kindle Fire is probably the biggest example of such a device). The problem with this approach is that the user will not automatically wind up back at your app when the video finishes; they have to press the Back button, and at this point you've probably lost them.
As a second option, you can use the MediaPlayer API to play YouTube videos. But there are three caveats with this approach:
1) You need to make a call to YouTube's GData webservice API, passing it the ID of the video. You'll get back a ton of metadata, along with it the RTSP URL that you should pass to MediaPlayer to play back an H.264-encoded stream. This is probably the reason why your attempt to use MediaPlayer failed; you probably weren't using the correct URL to stream.
2) The GData/MediaPlayer approach will only play back low-resolution content (176x144 or similar). This is a deliberate decision on the part of YouTube, to prevent theft of content. Of course, this doesn't provide a very satisfactory experience. There are back-door hacks to get higher resolution streams, but they aren't supported on all releases of Android and using them is a violation of YouTube's terms of service.
3) The RTSP streams can be blocked by some internal networks/firewalls, so this approach may not work for all users.
The third option is to embed a WebView in your application. There two approaches you can take here:
1) You can embed a Flash object and run the standard desktop Flash player for YouTube. You can even use the Javascript API to control the player, and relay events back to the native Android app. This approach works well, but unfortunately Flash is being deprecated on the Android platform, and will not work for Android 4.1 and later.
2) You can embed a <video> tag to play YouTube via HTML5. Support for this varies between various releases of Android. It works well on Android 4.0 and later; earlier releases have somewhat spotty HTML5 <video> support. So, depending upon what releases of Android your application must support, you can take a hybrid approach of embedding HTML5 on Android 4.x or later, and Flash for all earlier versions of Android.
There are several threads here on StackOverflow about using HTML5 to play YouTube video; none of them really describe the entire process you must follow in one place. Here's links to a few of them:
Android - How to play Youtube video in WebView?
How to embed a YouTube clip in a WebView on Android
Play Youtube HTML5 embedded Video in Android WebView
All of this will get dramatically easier in the weeks/months to come; at Google I/O 2012, they presented/demoed a new YouTube API for Android that will support direct embedding of YouTube content in your application, with full support back to Android 2.2 (about 95% of the Android userbase as of this writing). It can't arrive fast enough.