Check if Youtube and Vimeo-clips are valid - php

Question

I have been trying for quite a while to check if submitted links are valid film-clips from youtube.com or vimeo.com but I didn't succeed.
Any ideas how to check url's like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc0rnCBCX2c&feature=fvhl (valid)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc0FFCBCX2c&feature=fvhl (not valid)
http://www.youtube.com/v/jc0rnCBCX2c (valid)
http://www.youtube.com/v/ddjcddddX2c (not valid)
http://www.vimeo.com/463l522 (not valid)
http://www.vimeo.com/1483909 (valid)
http://www.vimeo.com/lumiblue (not valid)
http://www.youtube.com/user/dd181921 (not valid)
?
I use php.

Answer 1

If you check the response headers from a request to http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/videoId where videoId is the google video Identifier, you should get a 200 if the video exists and a 400 (bad request) if the video doesn't exist.
// PHP code
// Check if youtube video item exists by the existance of the the 200 response
$headers = get_headers('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/' . $youtubeId);
if (!strpos($headers[0], '200')) {
echo "The YouTube video you entered does not exist";
return false;
}

Answer 2

i see a answer in this site :
www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Scripting/JavaScript/Q_23765374.html
and he said :
I would suggest using youtube's API since you are trying to validate if the video exists.
or if you don't want to go into API stuff then you can do simple trick.
check this link:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/developers_guide_php.html#RetrievingVideoEntry
to check for the existence of a video you will need to extract "v" value and send a request that contains the video id to :
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/videoID
where videoID is the "v" value
for example a video FLE2htv9oxc
will be queried like this
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/FLE2htv9oxc
if it does not exist then you will get a page with "Invalid id"
if it exists, will return an XML feed having various info about the video.
this way you can check that the video exists.
hope this will get you in the right direction.
the same thing with vimeo , try to look in api documentation in there site.
http://www.vimeo.com/api

Answer 3

I wrote this function to check if the link is a valid youtube link.
/**
* This function will check if 'url' is valid youtube video and return the ID.
* If the return value === false then this is **not** a valid youtube url, otherwise the youtube id is returned.
*
* #param <type> $url
* #return <type>
*/
private static function get_youtube_id($url) {
$link = parse_url($url,PHP_URL_QUERY);
/**split the query string into an array**/
if($link == null) $arr['v'] = $url;
else parse_str($link, $arr);
/** end split the query string into an array**/
if(! isset($arr['v'])) return false; //fast fail for links with no v attrib - youtube only
$checklink = YOUTUBE_CHECK . $arr['v'];
//** curl the check link ***//
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$checklink);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 5);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$return = $arr['v'];
if(trim($result)=="Invalid id") $return = false; //you tube response
return $return; //the stream is a valid youtube id.
}

Answer 4

You can try to catch the 301 header that you tube throws if the video is no longer valid

Answer 5

/*
* Verify YouTube video status
*/
$videoID = "o8UCI7r1Aqw";
$header = get_headers("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/". $videoID);
switch($headers[0]) {
case '200':
// video valid
break;
case '403':
// private video
break;
case '404':
// video not found
break;
default:
// nothing above
break;
}

Answer 6

Since most of the comments here are a bit old, here's a quick thing I set up that checks if YouTube links are private or not.
The good thing about this approach is that it doesn't require us to set up API Credentials with Google or anything like that. I will assume that you would be able to follow the same approach with Vimeo or any other video provider that doesn't provide accurate status codes on request.
axios
.get(link)
.then((res) => {
if (StringUtils.isYouTubeLink(link)) {
// The "streamingData" substring should be present on
// all valid video requests. Private or non-existent
// videos won't have it
if (!res.data.includes("streamingData")) {
errorData.reason = "Video unavailable";
brokenLinks.push(errorData);
}
}
})