YouTube Audio Player
While I was procrastinating on my essay for GSW, I’ve made a couple slight changes to the YouTube Audio Player that should make it a little better.
Firstly, I’ve given you the ability to allow YouTube to set cookies. I’m not sure why anyone would be interested in doing this for a Music player, but its there. I guess the primary reason I set this is because youtube-nocookie wasn’t working properly the other day, as I soon found out from a comment on my blog. So if it isn’t showing up, you should allow YouTube to collect cookies.
The second, and by far the more important change is embedding the link (in the event that neither the object nor the embed shows) in a <noembed> tag. I’m not quite sure how I didn’t know about the existence of this tag, but I’ve gone ahead and programmed it in properly, which should get rid of the annoying duplication some users have been seeing on any players generated from this point forward.
And one last change I made while working on this blog post, I created an API! So now you can generate them on the fly if you want to and get just the HTML for the player. I’ll document the API below:
http://www.gtaero.net/ytmusic/?api=1
- &q=
- The URL to the YouTube Video or Playlist
- &a=1
- Only Add if you want the music to AutoPlay
- &loop=1
- Only Add if you want the music to Loop
- &js=1
- Only Add if you want to be able to use the JavaScript API with it
- &s=on
- Add if you want to enable the Progress Bar on the video.
- &psize= This is the progress bar size, acceptable variables are below
- s – Small, This will set the width of the video to 150px
- m – Medium, This will set the width of the video to 187px
- l – Large, This will set the width of the video to 224px
- &tc =1
- Only Add if you also want to show a timecode. Only works with progress bar. Changes the follow sizes to the corresponding pixels:
- s – 225px
- m – 262px
- l – 299px
- &invis=1
- Add if you want to make the player invisible. Note: People hate this.
- &html5=1
- Add if you want to use YouTube’s HTML5 player. You shouldn’t use this. Its VERY buggy.
- &cookie=1
- Add if you’re okay with YouTube setting cookies on the user’s computer.
And that’s all! Enjoy!
Something Chrome Needs
There is a very common type of extension for Google Chrome, and that happens to be the “Notifier” type.
You have GMail Notifiers, Google Voice Notifiers, Google Reader, Google Docs, OWA, Facebook, Twitter, etc etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if Google Chrome just had a single Notification Center with a fantastic User Interface for showing notifications from whatever services register themselves with it?
I think it would, and over the summer – if I have spare time – I think I’m going to program an extension that will can accept additions for showing notifications. I’ll then ask around for help and/or program some basic services for it to use, and post it to the Chrome WebApp Store.
My next questions are:
- Would you use this? Is it a good idea?
- Would you code for this?
- Would you purchase this for $1?
At the moment, I’ve got plenty of cool programming projects, and I’m not making money with any of them. GVOMS is almost entirely free (no companies have purchased a license to use), and anything else I’ve done so far has been free and open source.
So unless people are going to start donating to me – which I’m pretty sure you aren’t – I need to find some way to make money. I’m a college student, after all.
And I don’t think $1 would be too much to ask for a unified notification center in Google Chrome, do you?