http://www.evilpumpkin.com/testingGround/multipart/youTubeRip/

How many times do you click on an embedded video and get the dreaded “This video has been removed….” message?

How about the meta-embed automatically searches other sites for the same video, or the closest approximation possible? If a Viacom-owned video isn’t available on Youtube, what are the chances it will be on one of the other hundreds of sites?

Yeah, that’s right. About 100%. Sites like Vodpod are already stepping in this direction. Now just automate it and save everyone a few minutes of manual searching.

You could either use meta-embed, or maybe even use a plugin that will work at the blog end of the layer, so that even a regular old Youtube embed could be changed.

Reading back through your post a couple of times, I think I was missing something. Plus, I might not have been as clear in a comment as I should have been.

First – to clarify in the comments.
Since you can successfully view a video using a snipped url, then your site only needs to allow the user to enter in the video id of the current showing and you take care of the “redirecting”. When they enter in a new video id, the snipped url will automatically redirect.

Second – I just really grasped what the original question was… what else would be good to show in some bracketed player? After giving it some thought… I can’t really think of any worthwhile information that I would want to see about a video from youtube. But that’s me… and not what a myspace user might actually care about.

Instead of thinking about what info to show, let’s think about what functions to add… and not hang up on how it would work in myspace (which may be important, but not something to design around at the front end).

Since the snipped url works, could you add a “next” button / link that restarted the player and showed the next video the “distributor” had selected? The mytvchannel.com site would simply redirect to another video_id that the distributor had chosen.

Unfortunately it’s too late in the evening / morning for me to come up with other functions.

So, in theory, you could add a video (either from youtube or original content loaded to splashcast) and then add an advertisement in a form of a video, image, text, etc… and change them at any point in time.

If splashcast had a vault of ad content that you could add and had a tracking mechanism to know the views / clicks generated from a channel, they could pay the owner of that channel.

Try it for yourself. Copy the below into notepad (two seperate files) and save as an html file and then open in a browser.

Original embed:


Snipped embed:


Looks like some of the basics are possible.

I wonder how many TOS that violates?

The youtube embed format is standard for all videos.
The only difference is the video ID.
It looks like this…
http://www.youtube.com/v/video_id
It’s in the embed code twice.

Now, again, not knowing how some things work… could you replace the “http://www.youtube.com….” with a URL such as “http://www.mytvchannel.com/joe/channel_1″ and use the technology behind something like snipurl to effective redirect to the right video?

The “snippet url” would always be the same, but the destination could change as needed.

I’ll test it out and let you know how it works.

But Graydon’s suggestion I like — but I’m not sure how we put an embed, which actually points to say a flash file on our server, which then points to the youtube file …that way, the user could update the flash file (on our server via our tools that we give them). But if we embed direct to youtube, then the link is forever to that youtube video — and can’t be changed. I mean, unless the user wants to take that code back out of their site, and put new code in.. but we’re trying to eliminate that hassle — and let the user go to our website, find a new video to display, and ‘activate it as current’, then it auto-updates in their player on their myspace page.

sorry if this makes no sense at all