YouTube FLV Ripper
In my previous post I created a widget called “MyTube” which uses the YouTube api to find my favorite videos. It’s actually quite simple - you just make a rest call to youtube’s api services which return an xml to whatever you called. I then just extract the specific child nodes from the xml that need. However, to create a fully customized player, I had to get to the YouTube flv source to stream instead of loading a pre-compiled swf player that YouTube already pushes out. That’s where the flv ripper service comes to use. I take the video id which then goes to the flv ripper service and returns to me a link to stream into the player.
I can’t take credit for the ripper code unfortunately, I don’t have time to write one - but KEJ did with his online ripper called GooTube FLV Ripper and made the php source code available. I took his code modified it to create a serviceable interface for flash so calls to the service returned to me a url bounded to object in flash then created the app below. Pretty sweet. I’m working on creating a flv widget for mac os x and yahoo. I’d like to thank KEJ!
