How to embed YouTube videos in PHP?

Can anyone give me an idea how can we show or embed a YouTube video if we just have the URL or the Embed code?

You have to ask users to store the 11 character code from the youtube video.

For e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

The eleven character code is : Ahg6qcgoay4

You then take this code and place it in your database. Then wherever you want to place the youtube video in your page, load the character from the database and put the following code:-

e.g. for Ahg6qcgoay4 it will be :

<object width="425" height="350" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ahg6qcgoay4" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ahg6qcgoay4" /></object>

Do not store the embed code in your database -- YouTube may change the embed code and URL parameters from time to time. For example the <object> embed code has been retired in favor of <iframe> embed code. You should parse out the video id from the URL/embed code (using regular expressions, URL parsing functions or HTML parser) and store it. Then display it using whatever mechanism currently offered by YouTube API.

A naive PHP example for extracting the video id is as follows:

<?php
    preg_match(
        '/[\\?\\&]v=([^\\?\\&]+)/',
        'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzHvVoUGTOM&feature=channel',
        $matches
    );
    // $matches[1] should contain the youtube id
?>

I suggest that you look at these articles to figure out what to do with these ids:

• Embed YouTube Videos, Playlists and More with IFrame Embeds

To create your own YouTube video player:

• YouTube Embedded Player Parameters
• YouTube JavaScript Player API Reference

From both long and short youtube urls you can get the embed this way:

$ytarray=explode("/", $videolink);
$ytendstring=end($ytarray);
$ytendarray=explode("?v=", $ytendstring);
$ytendstring=end($ytendarray);
$ytendarray=explode("&", $ytendstring);
$ytcode=$ytendarray[0];
echo "<iframe width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/$ytcode\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen></iframe>";

Hope it helps someone

The <object> and <embed> tags are deprecated as per HTML Youtube Videos, it is preferable to use the <iframe> tag to do so.

<iframe width="420" height="315"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XGSy3_Czz8k?autoplay=1">
</iframe>

In order for your users not spend their entire lifetime trying to find the video id in links to put it in your form field, let them post the link of the video they find on youtube and you can use the following regex to obtain the video id:

preg_match("/^(?:http(?:s)?:\/\/)?
    (?:www\.)?(?:m\.)?(?:youtu\.be\/|youtube\.com\/(?:(?:watch)?\?(?:.*&)?v(?:i)?=|
    (?:embed|v|vi|user)\/))([^\?&\"'>]+)/", $url, $matches);

To get the video id you can fetch it $matches[1], these will match:

• youtube.com/v/vidid
• youtube.com/vi/vidid
• youtube.com/?v=vidid
• youtube.com/?vi=vidid
• youtube.com/watch?v=vidid
• youtube.com/watch?vi=vidid
• youtu.be/vidid
• youtube.com/embed/vidid
• http://youtube.com/v/vidid
• http://www.youtube.com/v/vidid
• https://www.youtube.com/v/vidid
• youtube.com/watch?v=vidid&wtv=wtv
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?dev=inprogress&v=vidid&feature=related
• https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vidid

Part of this answer is referred by @shawn's answer in this question.

Use a regex to extract the "video id" after watch?v=

Store the video id in a variable, let's call this variable vid

Get the embed code from a random video, remove the video id from the embed code and replace it with the vid you got.

I don't know how to deal with regex in php, but it shouldn't be too hard

Here's example code in python:

>>> ytlink = 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-dXUEbBz70'
>>> import re
>>> vid = re.findall( r'v\=([\-\w]+)', ytlink )[0]
>>> vid
'7-dXUEbBz70'
>>> print '''<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/%s&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/%s&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>''' % (vid,vid)
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7-dXUEbBz70&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7-dXUEbBz70&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
>>>

The regular expression v\=([\-\w]+) captures a (sub)string of characters and dashes that comes after v=

Here is some code I've wrote to automatically turn URL's into links and automatically embed any video urls from youtube. I made it for a chat room I'm working on and it works pretty well. I'm sure it will work just fine for any other purpose as well like a blog for instance.

All you have to do is call the function "autolink()" and pass it the string to be parsed.

For example include the function below and then echo this code.

`
echo '<div id="chat_message">'.autolink($string).'</div>';

/****************Function to include****************/

<?php

function autolink($string){
    // force http: on www.
    $string = str_ireplace( "www.", "http://www.", $string );
    // eliminate duplicates after force
    $string = str_ireplace( "http://http://www.", "http://www.", $string );
    $string = str_ireplace( "https://http://www.", "https://www.", $string );

    // The Regular Expression filter
    $reg_exUrl = "/(http|https|ftp|ftps)\:\/\/[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(\/\S*)?/";
    // Check if there is a url in the text

$m = preg_match_all($reg_exUrl, $string, $match); 

if ($m) { 
$links=$match[0]; 
for ($j=0;$j<$m;$j++) { 
            
    if(substr($links[$j], 0, 18) == 'http://www.youtube'){
    
    $string=str_replace($links[$j],'<a href="'.$links[$j].'" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">'.$links[$j].'</a>',$string).'<br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="320" height="185" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/'.substr($links[$j], -11).'" frameborder="0" allowFullScreen></iframe><br />';
     
    
    }else{
    
    $string=str_replace($links[$j],'<a href="'.$links[$j].'" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">'.$links[$j].'</a>',$string);
    
        } 
     
    } 
} 




               return ($string);
 }

?>

`

If you want to upload videos programatically, check the YouTube Data API for PHP

Searching for this same topic I found another method using Javascript an Youtube API's

Directly from: <http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/#simple_embed>

Loading the API

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>

And executing the following javascript code:

  google.load("swfobject", "2.1");
  function _run() {

    var videoID = "ylLzyHk54Z0"
    var params = { allowScriptAccess: "always" };
    var atts = { id: "ytPlayer" };
    // All of the magic handled by SWFObject (http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/)
    swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.youtube.com/v/" + videoID + "&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=player1",
                       "videoDiv", "480", "295", "8", null, null, params, atts);
    
    
  }
  google.setOnLoadCallback(_run);

The complete sample is in the previously referred page <http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground>

You can do this simple with Joomla. Let me assume a sample YouTube URL - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndmXkyohT1M

<?php 
$youtubeUrl =  JUri::getInstance('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndmXkyohT1M');
$videoId = $youtubeUrl->getVar('v'); ?>
		
<iframe id="ytplayer" type="text/html" width="640" height="390"  src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/<?php echo $videoId; ?>"  frameborder="0"/>

You can simply create a php input form for Varchar date,give it a varchar length of lets say 300. Then ask the users to copy and paste the Embed code.When you view the records, you will view the streamed video.

Just a small update to Alec Smart's answer: since AS2 is deprecated now, the '?version=3' is required to get his example to work. See the Youtube reference at [YouTube Embedded Players and Player Parameters][1] under "Selecting content to play" for details.

In other words:

<object width="425" height="350" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ahg6qcgoay4?version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ahg6qcgoay4?version=3" /></object>

Apparently, the Youtube reference above does this as follows (the inner embed presumably used as a fallback for browsers that don't yet support the object tag):

<object width="640" height="390">
  <param name="movie"
         value="https://www.youtube.com/v/u1zgFlCw8Aw?version=3&autoplay=1"></param>
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param>
  <embed src="https://www.youtube.com/v/u1zgFlCw8Aw?version=3&autoplay=1"
         type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
         allowscriptaccess="always"
         width="640" height="390"></embed>
</object>

Or using iframes (replace http://example.com with your site's domain):

<iframe id="ytplayer" type="text/html" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/u1zgFlCw8Aw?autoplay=1&origin=http://example.com" frameborder="0"/>

[1]: https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters, "YouTube Embedded Players and Player Parameters"

luvboy,

If i understand clearly, user provides the URL/code of the Youtube video and then that video is displayed on the page.

For that, just write a simple page, with layout etc.. Copy video embed code from youtube and paste it in your page. Replace embed code with some field, say VideoID. Set this VideoId to code provided by your user.

edit: see answer by Alec Smart.

This YouTube embed generator solve all my problems with video embedding.