OUseful Info

Youtube Playlists and Related Videos, (and Neulio) All Mixed Up With Yahoo Pipes and Grazr Goodness

Some time ago, before Youtube exposed the Youtube gdata API, I created a Yahoo pipe that used Dapper to scrape a Youtube playlist page to create an RSS feed with video enclosures that could be played in a a Grazr widget.

The Dapper screenscraper was brittle as anything, with the result that the feed kept breaking, but I just kept on failing to get round to fixing the pipe.

Anyway - last night I did fix it (2-3 mins all told, replacing the feed from the broken dapp with one from the youtube api!) so now here's a Youtube playlist feed augmentation pipe. The augmentation adds an enclosure that points to the actual video file.

You can supply the playlist ID via the pipe URL using either just the playlisyt ID, or by pasting in the playlist page URL (hopefully!).

Here's an example of it in action:

I also tweaked my simple Grazr Youtube playlist viewer Grazr widget to use the new feed. (All it does is provide you with a text entry box to enter a Youtube playlist, which it will then go and grab for you and play in the widget.)

[Just by the by, here's the URL pattern for a Yotube playlist RSS feed: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/93EFDACF7A474A90]

While I was looking at the Youtube gdata API pages, I noticed that feeds are also available for related/recomended videos. GIve it one video Id, and you'll get a list of related videos in return. So here's an augmentation of that feed: Youtube Related videos augmented feed.

Just because, I thought it might also prove interesting to write a little OPML generating script that would take a playlist feed, and augment each video with a link to another augmented feed listing related videos. The OPML generator can be found here (the id points to a Youtube playlist id): http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/xmltools/youtubePlaylistRelated.php?id=5267E98BCC86741D

Here's what that one looks like:

To get the videos of the original feeds embedded, I had to put the video player embed code into the actual OPML file. It would be really handy if the Grazr app could take just the URL for an embeddable media item in an OPML outline element and then embed it automatically, in the same way it embeds RSS feed enclosures.

On a final Pipes and Grazr related point, I came across Neulio today via Mashable (Neulio is a Free Video Site for Educational Clips), which offers home for people wanting to build 'courses' out of individual video 'lessons'. I didn't notice any feeds coming from the courses I looked at, so here's a pipe that will generate an enclosure augmented feed:

Neulio course feeds pipe

Paste in the URl of a neulio course and it should give you a course feed out.

Here it is in a Grazr widget:

One thing I had hoped was that the flash movie enclosure would be automatically embedded in the GRazr widget, but that doesn't seem to be the case?

Grazr will embed audio players for mp3 files automatically, and also comes with embedding Youtube movies and Slideshare presentations automagically, but maybe these richer flash assets are only embedded if the serving domain/path is recognised, rather than embedding everyhting possible, which would be the more general case?

PS if the idea of Grazr delivered content appears to you, why not check out Feedlearner...

PPS see also RSS Feed Demo from Yale Open Courseware

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Tags: youtube, grazr, neulio, yahoo pipes, fastreams, feed annotation streams

Posted by ajh59 at January 10, 2008 10:41 AM