Retrieve player state with multiple youtube players on a page

Question

I hava a single HTML with many youtube players.

I'm suscribing to the onStateChange to get notified when the user plays a video.

function onYouTubePlayerReady(playerid) {
    var player = document.getElementById("playerA");
    player.addEventListener("onStateChange", "callback");
}

Now the callback get the newState as parameter.

function callback(newState) {
    ...
}

This works ok with only one player. But with many players, how can I know wich player raised the StateChange event? Callback just have one parameter.

Is there a way to know which player raised the event form callback or i have to set uo a diferent callback for each one?

Answer 1

Here is my solution based on the other answers:

(1) Add id parameter to the object and/or embed tags

(2) Add playerapiid parameter to video urls (it should match the id)

<object id="video1" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/AAAAAAAAAAA&version=3&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=video1" ...>
    <embed ...>
</object>
<object id="video2" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/BBBBBBBBBBB&version=3&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=video2" ...>
    <embed ...>
</object>

(3) Create named callback functions for each video and assign them to the player in the onYouTubePlayerReady event. Here is one way of doing it:

function onYouTubePlayerReady(playerApiId) {
  var player = document.getElementById(playerApiId);
  window["onStateChange" + playerApiId] = function(state) {
    console.log("#" + playerApiId + ": new state " + state);
  };
  player.addEventListener("onStateChange", "onStateChange" + playerApiId);
}

I have published a demo here.

Answer 2

I had this exact same problem. Here's my solution:

var videos = {};

//store the video player's data in the hash, with the playerapiid as the key
function loadFeaturedVideo(youTubeVideoId) {
    videos["featuredytplayer"] = {
        "yt_id": youTubeVideoId,
        "wrapperSelector": "#featured_player_wrapper",
        "embed": "featuredYtPlayer"
    };
    ...
}

function onYouTubePlayerReady(playerId) {
    var currentVideo = videos[playerId];
    var ytPlayer = document.getElementById(currentVideo["embed"]);
    videos[playerId]["stateChangeListener"] = function(newState) {
        var container = $(currentVideo["wrapperSelector"]);

        ...
    }
    ytPlayer.addEventListener("onStateChange", "videos['" + playerId + "']['stateChangeListener']");
    ...
}

Then you can just access whatever variables you want via the closure. Ideally, we could just use an anonymous function in addEventListener(), but due to limitations in the ActionScript/Javascript bridge, that's not possible.

Inspired by this discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/youtube-api-gdata/browse_thread/thread/e8a8c85b801b9e25

Answer 3

@alalonde's solution doesn't work anymore because Adobe imposed additional restrictions on the characters that can be used for Flash event listeners. You can no longer use [] or (), which makes the previous solutions regarding this issue obsolete. Those characters will generate the following javascript error:

identifier starts immediately after numeric literal

Here's my solution (using period characters):

var players = {}; // global to keep track of all players on the page
function onYouTubePlayerReady (idPlayer) {
   var ytPlayer = document.getElementById (idPlayer);
   var idPlayerParams = 'yt' + Math.floor (Math.random()*100000); // create random varable name
   players [idPlayerParams] = {
        idPlayer: idPlayer,
        onStateChanged: function (state) {
            alert ('youtube player state changed to: ' + state + ', player id: ' + idPlayer);
        },
        onError: function (err) {
            alert ('youtube player error: ' + err + ', player id: ' + idPlayer);
        }
    };
    ytPlayer.addEventListener ('onStateChange', 'players.' + idPlayerParams + '.onStateChanged');
    ytPlayer.addEventListener ('onError', 'players.' + idPlayerParams + '.onError');
}