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Display YouTube Videos Without Exiting Your Application

Posted on May 19, 2010 by in Video


If you’d like to play a YouTube video inside your application there are two common ways to do this, by launching the YouTube player and by using a UIWebview.

Launch Native YouTube Application

This approach will exit your application and begin the YouTube player on the iPhone:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] 
   openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gczw0WRmHQU"]];

Clickable Thumbnail and UIWebview

If you’ve noticed in Safari on the iPhone, when the browser finds a YouTube video reference, a clickable link is created, which will start the movie when tapped without leaving Safari.

We can use the same approach within an iPhone application using a UIWebView, including a clickable link with a poster frame from the movie.

For this example I have created a separate class that subclasses UIWebView:

@interface YouTubeView : UIWebView 
{
}
 
- (YouTubeView *)initWithStringAsURL:(NSString *)urlString frame:(CGRect)frame;
 
@end

Here’s the implementation of the class:

#import "YouTubeView.h"
 
@implementation YouTubeView
 
#pragma mark -
#pragma mark Initialization
 
- (YouTubeView *)initWithStringAsURL:(NSString *)urlString frame:(CGRect)frame;
{
  if (self = [super init]) 
  {
    // Create webview with requested frame size
    self = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:frame];
 
    // HTML to embed YouTube video
    NSString *youTubeVideoHTML = @"<html><head>\
                          <body style=\"margin:0\">\
                          <embed id=\"yt\" src=\"%@\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" \
                          width=\"%0.0f\" height=\"%0.0f\"></embed>\
                          </body></html>";
 
    // Populate HTML with the URL and requested frame size
    NSString *html = [NSString stringWithFormat:youTubeVideoHTML, urlString, frame.size.width, frame.size.height];
 
    // Load the html into the webview
    [self loadHTMLString:html baseURL:nil];
  }
  return self;  
}
 
#pragma mark -
#pragma mark Cleanup
 
- (void)dealloc 
{
  [super dealloc];
}
 
@end

The magic here is the HTML for embedding the video content, and notice how the HTML is populated with the video URL and the desired frame size.

We can now insert this view inside a ViewController class as shown here:

 
  // Create view that will act as link to youtube video,
  // centering the view 
  YouTubeView *youTubeView = [[YouTubeView alloc] 
    initWithStringAsURL:@"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gczw0WRmHQU" 
    frame:CGRectMake(100, 170, 120, 120)];
 
  [[self view] addSubview:youTubeView];

Here is how the clickable link looks, the image on the left is before the poster frame has downloaded, the right includes the poster frame:

Tapping the link will start the movie in a webview.

Project Source Code

You can download the source code here: Display YouTube Video Inside an iPhone Application.

Note: As Joao mentions in a comment below, this code will not run on the simulator.

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