Getting title and description of embedded YouTube video

Question

On a site I\'m developing I embed videos from YouTube and want to get the video title and its description.

How do I get that information?

Answer 1

To get the DESCRIPTION element, you need to access the gdata version of the video's info, and you can return json using alt=json on the path. In this case, oHg5SJYRHA0 is the video ID, found at the end of the url of the video you're working with on YouTube, e.g. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/oHg5SJYRHA0?v=2&alt=json&prettyprint=true

(the prettyprint is formatting to make that easy to read, you don't need it for what you're doing)

You can grab the JSON, add it into a variable and access it using jQuery:

var youTubeURL = 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/oHg5SJYRHA0?v=2&alt=json';
var json = (function() {
    var json = null;
    $.ajax({
        'async': false,
        'global': false,
        'url': youTubeURL,
        'dataType': "json",
        'success': function(data) {
            json = data;
        }
    });
    return json;
})();

Then access it using object notation:

alert("Title: " + json.entry.title.$t +"\nDescription:\n " + json.entry.media$group.media$description.$t + "\n");