Searching YouTube and displaying first video in PHP, advice needed? - php

Question

I'm not sure when, but at some point my YouTube searching method stopped working, it has worked for years but both the API and the preferred method of displaying embedded video has changed. I've looked at the official Google docs and I have the option of using Zend or the currently in development Version 3 of the Google API, these are a lot larger codebases than what I was currently using.
I've tried debugging my code and may eventually get it working again, should I just scrap it and integrate the more official PHP codebase into my project. This was is where my method sits, it finds data, but I don't seem to display any videos...
public function embeddableVideoClipFor($searchString)
{
// Previous experience revealed that video search is not perfect, but we're just going to giver and create an embedded player with the
// top result or return NULL
// I used this as a guide to build my embedded player http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/youtube_player_demo.html
$embeddableVideoClipHTML = NULL;
// Further details on searching YouTube http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-youtubeapi/
// This was working well for over two years but now I'm getting no videos, I may have been throttled or more likely the API has changed...
// Before switching to Zend or going to switch to version 3.0 of Google/YouTube API I should try and debug...
$vq = $searchString;
$vq = preg_replace('/[[:space:]]+/', ' ', trim($vq));
$vq = urlencode($vq);
$feedURL = 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=' . $vq . '&safeSearch=none&orderby=viewCount&v=2'; // Added version two tag...
print_r($feedURL);
// read feed into SimpleXML object
try
{
$youTubeXML = simplexml_load_file($feedURL);
}
catch(Exception $e)
{
// This rarely throws an error, but when it does, I just want to pretend I can't find a video clip
$youTubeXML = NULL;
}
print("<pre>");
print_r($youTubeXML);
print("</pre>");
if(($youTubeXML != NULL) && ( ! empty($youTubeXML->entry->link[0]['href'])))
{
$videoLink = $youTubeXML->entry->link[0]['href']; // This is not enough, I need to trim the beginning and end off this to just get the video code
$trimedURL = str_replace('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=', '' , $videoLink);
$videoCode = str_replace('&feature=youtube_gdata', '', $trimedURL);
// $embeddableVideoClipHTML = '<object style="height: 390px; width: 640px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/' . $videoCode . '"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/' . $videoCode . '?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="390"></object>';
// $embeddableVideoClipHTML = '<iframe id="ytplayer" type="text/html" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/' . $videoCode . '"frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>';
// Version 3
$embeddableVideoClipHTML = '<object width="640" height="360"><param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/' . $videoCode . '?version=3"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="https://www.youtube.com/v/' . $videoCode . '?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="360"></embed></object>';
}
return $embeddableVideoClipHTML;
}

Answer 1

I'm not sure why, because I did try it, but switching to the iFrame, ie this line of code:
// $embeddableVideoClipHTML = '<iframe id="ytplayer" type="text/html" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/' . $videoCode . '"frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>';
Works now, but I still wonder if I should jump through hoops to use one of the more official PHP frameworks, I really only use this one method to access the Google/YouTube api, it isn't a big part of my mashup, but I like it for movie trailers and song lyric quotations.