Playing video from youtube link without UIWebView

Question

I want to play a video in my app from youtube link e.g: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uner-3tTY1I.

But i don't want to redirect the user to any web view in the app. Just want to play that video in the video player in the current view of my application.

Is it possible to play the video without redirecting to UIWebView? If possible, how can i do this? Thanks for the help in advance.

Answer 1

The only allowed way seems to be using UIWebview. Doing it other way will violate youtube copyrights.

However there are few open source libraries out there. You can use it at your own risk.

Answer 2

Yes please look at the youtube api to help you get started. Watch this nice tutorial on how to implement and use all the features of the youtube API.

Answer 3

Just use XCDYouTubeVideoPlayerViewController. It uses progressive download + MoviePlayer and AVFoundation frameworks.

Answer 4

To play this video you need to have the link to the video stream that is associated with video you want to play. Unfortunately this isn't so simple to get this link for some movies on YouTube since this link can be encoded for some movies (channel VEVO for example). Read this for more information about encoded links http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/06/youtube-download-counter-countermeasures-applied/.

Unfortunattely as for now there is no simple way to decode these links. Despite this, you can get the source link for the not encoded films without bigger problems using some calls to the YouTube Api.