Skip to main content

Quick and dirty Android YouTube fullscreen sample code.

I am currently developing an application that requires playing YouTube videos in full screen mode. After scraping around and putting together the pieces, I currently have the following code which I hope is of use to anybody else out there.


  public void playYouTubeVideo(String videoId) {

    String videoTemplate = "@YTBASE@@VIDEO@";

    String videoAction = videoTemplate
        .replace("@YTBASE@", "vnd.youtube://")
        .replace("@VIDEO@", videoId);

    Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse(videoAction));
    intent.putExtra("VIDEO_ID", videoAction);
    intent.putExtra("force_fullscreen", true);

    startActivity(intent);
  }

There are some points to bear in mind though...
  1. Once the ACTION_VIEW intent has control, your application is effectively paused i.e. it won't work until you use the back button to exit the player intent and return to your application.
  2. It may or may not work in the future of YT change the way they operate, but that's always the case.
Point 2 is the reason I have used the variables videoTemplate and the @ delimited markers... hopefully you can see what's going on there and change it in the future if you need to.

I now realise that I may well have to use the "official" YouTube API and create an application API key and all the rest of it but if it means seamless integration then I will do just that but I thought I'd at least share what I had so far.

So, I hope the above serves useful to you. Back to the hack...


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angular.JS ... absolutely awesome BUT...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! Sort the documentation soon please!  More soon, I really do like it though. :)
Post a Comment
Read more

PHP and Lisp: multiple-value-bind (MVB)

This is another article in my attempts to find new ways of looking at PHP and making it less of a chore to type in all that code. As much as I love PHP I hate wasting keystrokes. More typing is more errors is more grief. Being an off and on user of Lisp, although not as much as I used to, one of the things that I always liked in Lisp was the ability to be able to return multiple values from a function at once using (values) and then marry that with (multiple-value-bind) to create convenient named bindings for whatever you were about to do. I recently found myself wanting to return a couple of values from a helper function and I just didn't want to go to the trouble of having to type all those character required to create an array with keys for the two values and then I remembered MVB and a little light went on in my head! If somebody else has already done this then I apologise up front but it was new to me and I haven't seen it anywhere else so this could be a first! ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Handling multipart/form-data with NanoHTTPD

I am in the process of reviving an old project from 2014 that I never finished because of other work commitments. In that time, bitrot has set in, the Android API has moved on and all in all, the home-brewed HTTP server I wrote using SocketServer and the org.apache libraries had to go! I looked around, found a couple of contenders and after much time decided to go with NanoHTTPD because it is lean, small and fits in exactly two files. The main server is in one file `NanoHTTPD.java`and there is another file called `ServerRunner.java` which manages instances of running servers. The others The other project I looked at is this one:  https://github.com/koush/AndroidAsync which led me a merry dance and I just couldn't figure out how get the POST data I had uploaded. I spent a few days really digging at it with Wire Shark too to make sure the data was going up. It was. Whatever... I had used it via a gradle dependency entry but I dropped it and went back to NanoHTTPD. For m...
Post a Comment
Read more