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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...


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