Youtube Browser-Based Uploader with PHP

Download Example

RD2 wanted to add something special with our 3rd iteration of building the World Traveler Internship website. We created a very unique feature within the application process. The users could upload their submission video and with a little behind the scenes magic, the video is automatically added to a designated World Traveler Internship YouTube account and added to their bio page on the website.

This is made possible using Youtube’s browser-based uploading API v2.0. The example that the API gives you are good, but not great. I wasn’t able to find examples for exactly what I needed in PHP. So I created my own 2 step process for uploading the user’s file to YouTube.

Before you start, I would suggest downloading the example and looking at that as you read the below code. Below are the steps you will need in order to create your browser-based Youtube uploader:

1. Create your 2 step form

index.php

    

        Video Title
        
        Video Description
        
        
    
 


token != '' ) : ?>
    
Title:
    

    
Description:
    

    

        

            Upload Video
            
                
            
        
        
        
    
 

2. Get the Youtube Token

Once the form is submitted, you will need to submit the title and description to Youtube. Youtube will return a token that you will then use to upload your video.

index.php

get_youtube_token.php code:

            
              
                ' . stripslashes( $youtube_video_title ) . '
                ' . stripslashes( $youtube_video_description ) . '
                '.$youtube_video_category.'
                '.$youtube_video_keywords.'
              
            ';

$headers = array( "Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=".$authvalue,
             "GData-Version: 2",
             "X-GData-Key: key=".$key,
             "Content-length: ".strlen( $data ),
             "Content-Type: application/atom+xml; charset=UTF-8" );

$curl = curl_init( "http://gdata.youtube.com/action/GetUploadToken");
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_REFERER, true );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0 );

$response = simplexml_load_string( curl_exec( $curl ) );
curl_close( $curl );
?>

At this point, we check to make sure we have our YouTube token ( $response ), and then show step 2 of our form.

3. Submit the video using the YouTube token and url.

Once the user submits the video to YouTube, it will return 2 url get variables, the status of the video and the id. If the status is 200, then the video upload was successful.

index.php

You can then display a message once the YouTube video is uploaded successfully.

index.php

    
Video Successfully Uploaded!
    
Video's usually take around 2-3 hours to get accepted by youtube. Please check back soon.
    
Here is your url to view your video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
 

That should be it! Please download the example and leave a comment below if this article was useful to you.

Download Example