Annotating YouTube videos programmatically [closed]

Answer 1

Joe Berkovitz has written a sample application called ReviewTube which "Allows users to create time-based subtitles for any YouTube video, a la closed captioning. These captions become publicly accessible, and visitors to the site can browse the set of videos with captions. Think of it as a “subtitle graffiti wall” for YouTube!"

The app is the example used to demonstrate the MVCS framework/approach for building Flex applications.

http://www.joeberkovitz.com/blog/reviewtube/

Not sure if this will help with the colored rectangles and whatnot, but it's a decent place to start.

Answer 2

YouTube provides an ActionScript API.

Using this, you could load the videos into Flash using their API and then have your Flash app create the annotations on a layer above the video.

Or, alternatively, if you want to stay away from creating something in Flash, using YouTube's JavaScript API you could draw HTML DIVs over the YouTube player on your web page. Just remember when you embed the player to have WMODE="transparent" in the params list.

So using the example from YouTube:

  <script type="text/javascript">

    var params = { allowScriptAccess: "always" };
    var atts = { id: "myytplayer", wmode: "transparent" };
    swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=ytplayer", 
                       "ytapiplayer", "425", "356", "8", null, null, params, atts);

  </script>

And then you should be able to draw your annotations over the YouTube movie using CSS/DHTML.

Answer 3

The player itself has a Javascript API that might be useful for syncing the video if you choose to make your own annotation-thingamajig.