Android YouTubePlayer API won't autoplay videos when ads are embedded. - android

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?

Related

YouTube Embedded video views aren't counted in android app

I (actually my app team) embed my YouTube videos on the app.
The videos are played well in the app, but video views aren't counted.
We use YouTube IFrame API and android webview.
We checked the views are counted in PC and mobile, so we think IFrame API is okay.
We think the view-count problem is from Android webview.
Doesn't Android webview count YouTube video views originally?
I don't set autoplay for video watching.
Thank you.
You need to disable autoplay and let users play the video through the native play button since: "YouTube only counts playbacks that are initiated through the native play button." REF

AutoPlay Youtube frame API on Android

Impossible to autoplay youtube videos in an Android webview by using youtube iframe API. Does someone knows if that is possible?
As already mentioned in Mobile Considerations, functions and parameters such as autoplay, playVideo(), loadVideoById() won't work in all mobile environments due to the restrictions wherein HTML5 <video> element only allows playback to take place if it's initiated by a user interaction.
You may, however, try the given suggestions in the following SO posts and might work for you:
Youtube Api android autostart
You can use loadVideo() method which loads and plays the specified video. And, there is also the cueVideo() method, which adds the video to the playlist, but does not automatically start playing the video.
Android webview html5 video autoplay not working on android 4.0.3
You can usually work around it by triggering the play() on another event (eg the onloaded event).
Hope that helps!

Infinite buffering in YouTube API

Play any YouTube video .Pause and forward the video, buffering loader shows and the play icon not appearing. End Result : Infinite loading occurs.
I don't know if this really answers the questions, but I was having a similar issue with infinite loading.
Basically I would play a video using a player fragment, exit the video, and then the next video I would try to play would display an infinite loading indicator.
This issue was only happening on certain devices.
Since I was using the latest version of the youtube api, I updated the youtube app on the problematic devices and that seemed to resolve the issue.
Hope this helps.

How to play a youtube video in side-by-side view on Android WebView

I'm trying to make an Android App and I need help.
Do you have any idea how to play a online video (like a video on Youtube) in side-by-side view at the very same time by using Android WebView?
so, when I watch a Youtube video, I want to be able to have two views on left and right side on My Android SmartPhone Screen, and play and control the same video both on left and right views at the very same time.
Regards.
----2nd Feb, edited----
following things I've tried and failed.
・using Youtube API, get 3gp address, and try to play it with VideoView
・Using draw method and getDrawingCache method of WebView
・using onShowCustomView of WebView
Look at using a html5 video player like Video.js or Sublime Video. You will need to create some javascript with each of these that fires the left and right video at the same time.
You can also look at what this guys did for some more inspiration.
http://html5demos.com/two-videos
The trick is getting the videos to fire at the same time if you need them in sync. It's not easy to achieve if you don't control the source video and server as you are relying on an outside party to do this. YouTube is NOT a good choice for serving your videos if you need them to be in sync as you can't guarantee the video load and launch times, or control if an ad will get injected into the video stream.

Playing youtube video in Android app

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.

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