Retrieve A Single YouTube Video in .NET

Back in 2009 I wrote a simple web application to output all videos uploaded from a user’s channel. Luckily, hardly anything has changed. Now you only need to register for a Developer Key and state an Application Name. You are no longer required to provide a Client ID.

This time round, I needed to output data onto my page from a single YouTube entry when a user pastes the URL of a YouTube video in one of my form fields.

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Google.GData;
using Google.YouTube;
using Google.GData.Client;

namespace MyProject.Helpers.Common
{
    public class YouTubeHelper
    {
        private static string YouTubeDeveloperKey = WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["YouTubeDeveloperKey"].ToString();
        private static string YouTubeAppName = WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["YouTubeAppName"].ToString();

        //Get YouTube video
        public static Video YouTubeVideoEntry(string videoID)
        {
            YouTubeRequestSettings settings = new YouTubeRequestSettings(YouTubeAppName, YouTubeDeveloperKey);
            YouTubeRequest request = new YouTubeRequest(settings);

            //Link to the feed we wish to read from
            string feedUrl = String.Format("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/{0}", videoID);

            Feed<Video> videoFeed = request.Get<Video>(new Uri(feedUrl));

            return videoFeed.Entries.SingleOrDefault();
        }

        //Extract the YouTube ID from the web address.
        public static string GetVideoID(string videoUrl)
        {
            Uri tempUri = new Uri(videoUrl); 

            string sQuery = tempUri.Query;

            return System.Web.HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(sQuery).Get("v");
        }

        //Get required YouTube video information
        public static YouTubeDetail GetVideoInformation(string url)
        {
            Video v = YouTubeVideoEntry(GetVideoID(url));

            //Pass required YouTube information to custom class called YouTubeDetail
            YouTubeDetail vDetail = new YouTubeDetail();
            vDetail.ID = v.VideoId;
            vDetail.Title = v.Title;
            vDetail.Description = v.Description;

            return vDetail;
        }
    }
}

Hopefully, my “YouTubeHelper” class is easy to follow. All you need to use is the “GetVideoInformation()” method by simply passing a page link to where your YouTube video resides. At the moment only full YouTube URL’s are accepted not the short URL (http://youtu.be/).