Google has been providing a GData_ API to Youtube since a few
months now, this is quite cool because it allows applications
like Totem_ to access videos stored at Youtube.

So I wrote a little Python wrapper using python-gdata_ to ease
access to that nice API, especially video thumbnails and direct
FLV urls. It's called YoutubeClient_, here's a little example:

::

    cli = YouTubeClient()

    for video in cli.recently_featured():
      thumb_url = cli.get_largest_thumbnail(video)
      flv_url = cli.get_flv_video_url(video.link[1].href)
      print video.title.text, thumb_url, flv_url

Right now, what you can do is:

- access standard feeds: recently_featured, most_viewed, top_rated
- browse Youtube tags
- access user-centric data: uploaded_videos, contacts, favorite_videos

This is really fun to use and would make a nice Elisa_
plugin... Any volunteer? :)

Next episode, accessing your Picasaweb data

.. _GData: http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/index.html
.. _Totem: http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/
.. _python-gdata: http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/
.. _YoutubeClient: http://svn.pythonfr.org/public/pythonfr/video/youtube_client.py
.. _Elisa: http://elisa.fluendo.com