Players-Cloud is a nodeJS backend to access and parse youtube video metadata. This works in conjunction with the iOS front-end called Players-iOS (specifically 2.x).
I love watching videos in my spare time. Whether its watching TV shows on my TiVo or online via Youtube/Twitch. When I got my iPod Touch in 2009, I religiously used the built in Youtube app to watch Gaming Let's Plays and other content. When Apple removed the Youtube app in iOS 6, I tried to find alternatives, however, as time went on these Youtube-app-alternatives got bloated and I eventually got frustrated. I spent more time closing the built in popup ads and "Rate me!" dialogues than actually enjoying the purpose of the app; watching my favorite youtube channels.
I was just so fed up with other apps that I took it upon myself to make something to satisfy my hunger of watching great content on Youtube.
I made a list of things I wanted in this REST API:
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nodeJS 10+: A simple lightweight server environment to quickly get up and running
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express: To build some webpages and the REST API part of the service
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async: Performance win for .each(...) & .parallel(...)
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timsort: Performance win using a battle-tested fast sorting algorithm
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node-ytdl-core: An abstraction over Youtube to access metadata for YouTube information
I started working on this in 2014 and I've been slowly working on it to improve its performance and reliability on both the front/back-end. With the front-end, I had to update the source to conform to the changes to the Swift language. With the back-end, I had to try different packages and Javascript techniques to shave milliseconds off the processing/response time.
In 2017, the cloud service was updated with a REST API that conforms to REST API conventions and supports JSON responses.
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Download the source:
git clone https://github.com/nextseto/Players-Cloud -
Get the packages needed to run the app:
npm install -
Go into the folder:
cd Players-Cloud -
Run the app:
YOUTUBE_API_KEY=<Insert Youtube API Key Here> node CORE.js
/channel/:ID - Get the most recent videos for a given array of channel IDs (separated by commas)
/video/detail/:ID/:format - Get some details for a given youtube video ID
/video/:ID/:format - Get all the details for a given youtube video ID
/search/:query/:nextToken/:options - Get a list of videos for a given query, page token, and filter option
/channel/detail/:ID - Get channel metadata for a given channel ID
Everything else - Redirects to this GitHub page
To learn more about the API...
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Look into the playgrounds file in the repository to have a more interactive way of experimenting with the REST APIs.
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Look at the examples folder for sample json responses.
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Alternately, CORE.js contains JSDoc documentation for the response and return requests payloads for each endpoint.
All source code in Players-Cloud is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.