A worm on YouTube, yesterday...
This may not be news to you, but I came across a secret game of "worm" while using YouTube yesterday - while the loading icon shows, simply press any two different cursor keys and the icon zooms off and you can keep yourself entertained while waiting. Of course, should you find yourself enjoying the game and not want the video to start, you should probably be watching more interesting videos in the first place...
Youtube has introduced a new URL shorthand – youtu.be
For example youtu.be/DIArJjU8HjE takes you to
youtube.com/watch?v=DIArJjU8HjE&feature=youtu.be
Annoyingly this means that any users pasting a youtu.be URL into your video parsing scripts will be told it doesn’t work, so we’d best get updating those scripts!
Pop this in before you start processing the url, where $url is, not surprisingly, the url to be parsed.
//dMb 21/4/2011 Hack to handle youtu.be URLs dave@absolutedisaster.co.uk $needle = '/^(http:\/\/)*(www\.)*(youtu\.be)\/([A-Za-z0-9]{11})$/'; preg_match($needle, $url, $result); if($result[3] == 'youtu.be'){ $url = 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=' . $result[4]; } //dMb end hack
[update 20110720-1657] While implementing this and similar for grabbing youtube thumbnails today I suddenly though, what if youtube ever starts using https? Well, the odds may be slim, but the costs of allowing for it are negligible, so why take the risk?
//dMb 21/4/2011 Hack to handle youtu.be URLs dave@absolutedisaster.co.uk //dMb 20/7/2011 Updated to allow for https $needle = '/^(http(s?):\/\/)*(www\.)*(youtu\.be)\/([A-Za-z0-9]{11})$/'; preg_match($needle, $url, $result); if($result[4] == 'youtu.be'){ $url = 'http' . $result[2] . '://www.youtube.com/watch?v=' . $result[5]; } //dMb end hack
[/update]
That particular link is the fantastic new video from my friends Six Toes – currently featured on the front of the Depeche Mode website.
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