YOUTUBE QUICK PLAY
YouTube broke 2 billion views a day just a couple of months back. I have played around with the API for two and a half years in various capacities, but I always stopped at the flash level of the chromeless player. Even though I managed to work through the AS3 implementation, I didn’t want to have to go through the pain of designing an interface for a player – I really wanted to play with the API itself.

Overview of YouTube Custom Player
YouTube broke 2 billion views a day just a couple of months back. I have played around with the API for two and a half years in various capacities, but I always stopped at the flash level of the chromeless player. Even though I managed to work through the AS3 implementation, I didn’t want to have to go through the pain of designing an interface for a player – I really wanted to play with the API itself.
I recently took a look at the updates to the YouTube API, and I was excited to see that the embeddable player is now controllable through the JavaScript API. As a result I threw it into an example that I created showcasing my other plugin, the jQuery Radmenu plugin. I wanted to have access to the player state change (so I could tell when the player had finished playing the active video) and as a result was capable of creating a sort of ‘YouTube wheel’ that just continuously plays.
All of my implementations of the YouTube API have been around the creation of playlists and/or stringing specific videos outside of the standard YouTube playlist implementation. The player is the integral part since you need to have a hook when the player has ended to queue up the next video.
Basically this jQuery plugin implements the YouTube Player API pretty much to spec. I’ve omitted some functions but believe I have captured most of the functionality a developer will need to implement a youtube player. The kind of things that this plugin allows the developer to simply get done are –
Features of jQuery YouTube player
- Play: the player & a specific video
- Pause the player
- Stop the player
- Seek to a particular point within a video
- Mute and Unmute the player & learn if the player is muted
- Get and set the volume of the player
- Get and set the video quality
- Destroy the player
- Friendly functions for player state changes
- onPlayerUnstarted
- onPlayerEnded
- onPlayerPlaying
- onPlayerPaused
- onPlayerBuffering
- onPlayerCued