Announce: YouTube Plugin

[Triode]

I've just released a plugin to play the audio from YouTube videos through Squeezeboxs. Please try and let me know your feedback. It should work on 7.5 and 7.6 servers. It should be available in the 3rd Party Plugin list on your squeezebox server. It will prefer an up to date version of 7.5 or 7.6.

WARNING: please note the plugin streams the entire YouTube video even though you are only listening to the audio. This means that it will consume significantly more internet bandwidth than other streaming plugins. If you have a usage limited internet connection, then be aware that using this plugin is the equivalent of streaming videos not audio.

Features:
- Browse YouTube top lists of most popular videos tagged with 'music'
- Search all YouTube videos or videos tagged with 'music'
- Playback of specific YouTube URL (of the form: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4H_Zoh7G5A)
- Playback will search for a video resolution which can be played, there is a setting on the web settings page to set if you prefer to select lower resolution videos to reduce bandwidth. By default it will try to play the higher quality audio streams.

Please report bugs and feature requests here, please include the specific server version used as the plugin uses some tricks to support 7.5 as well as 7.6 server and these may be the cause of bugs.

Thanks to Pipin for the suggestion..

[Pank]

Thanks. It works nice. Congratulation btw!

PS: Maybe future versions could play back video through the web interface.

Edit: Also, sometimes you are able to find mixes (I am not into youtube lingo, so this might not be the correct term). Anyway, it would be nice to be able to playback a mix such as this one:
http://www.youtube.com/artist?a=GxdC...yOcqr9bYeC0EkQ

[badboygolf16v]

Thanks for this plugin, great idea.

Sometimes the audio plays back too quickly. Sample rate issues perhaps? Did you see this before?

I'm running a Touch, SBS 7.5.4 on Windows Server 2008 Standard.

Any suggestions appreciated.

One video in particular will not play at the correct speed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thVZJ9TlPGs

[pberger]

Thanks. Great plugin!

Two suggestions:
- Playlist support (like http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PL7EFC7963DB9280CA or like the already mentioned http://www.youtube.com/artist?a=GxdC...yOcqr9bYeC0EkQ)
- Improved guessing of artist / trackname (eg. remove parts in brackets from the name)

[nervoteso]

i've installed plusing on nas qnap ts 119 and it doesn't work. it appears icon of the video but no sound....sigh

[Triode]

i've installed plusing on nas qnap ts 119 and it doesn't work. it appears icon of the video but no sound....sigh

There's two possible reasons for this:
1) the NAS does not have enough CPU power
2) the NAS does not use the logitech patched version of faad for transcoding aac streams (if this is the case then non aac based internet radio will work?)

Have you tried setting the bitrate setting to prefer lower bitrate streams? This should help on both fronts as the lower resoltion streams are lower bitrate (less work for the NAS) and also use mp3 audio so do not need transcoding on the server.

[pippin]

I'm not sure I can make adding weblink work - there appears to be no way to pass this through xmlbrowser to ipeg. I note that weblink is commented out in the latest version of the Biography plugin - perhaps for this reason..?

No, I believe it's commented out because Michael only briefly used it, then decided to process the links in the plugin and make the content available through the plugin which has the advantage that you don't have to switch apps.
I originally added it when the plugin did not yet allow to dig into additional content layers.

I don't think the plugin uses XMLBrowser, doesn't it?

[Triode]

No, I believe it's commented out because Michael only briefly used it, then decided to process the links in the plugin and make the content available through the plugin which has the advantage that you don't have to switch apps.
I originally added it when the plugin did not yet allow to dig into additional content layers.

I don't think the plugin uses XMLBrowser, doesn't it?

It doesn't use xmlbrowser itself but is called via it as trackinfo is xmlbrowser based. Let me take another look but it seems that I can't just include the link as a weblink.

[pippin]

It doesn't use xmlbrowser itself but is called via it as trackinfo is xmlbrowser based. Let me take another look but it seems that I can't just include the link as a weblink.

Could you add it as a sumbenu item which would not be XMLBrowser based then?

IF that's NOT possible: from the next iPeng version on iPeng will browse text for URLs so an item containing the URL in the text would then work, too, albeit not as slickly as the weblink for some reason.

[Triode]

Could you add it as a sumbenu item which would not be XMLBrowser based then?

IF that's NOT possible: from the next iPeng version on iPeng will browse text for URLs so an item containing the URL in the text would then work, too, albeit not as slickly as the weblink for some reason.

If you got the following would it be usable to you:

                          {
                             actions => {
                                   go => { weblink => "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uelHwf8o7_U" },
                                 },
                             addAction => "go",
                             text => "Watch YouTube Video",
                             type => "text",
                           },