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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).

Purpose

Introduction

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.

Development Requirements

I made a list of things I wanted in this REST API:

  • nodeJS 10+: A simple lightweight server environment to quickly get up and running

  • express: To build some webpages and the REST API part of the service

  • async: Performance win for .each(...) & .parallel(...)

  • timsort: Performance win using a battle-tested fast sorting algorithm

  • node-ytdl-core: An abstraction over Youtube to access metadata for YouTube information

Roadmap

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.

Setup

Option 1: Local Server

  1. Download the source: git clone https://github.com/nextseto/Players-Cloud

  2. Get the packages needed to run the app: npm install

  3. Go into the folder: cd Players-Cloud

  4. Run the app: YOUTUBE_API_KEY=<Insert Youtube API Key Here> node CORE.js

Option 2: Heroku

Deploy

REST API

All APIs return JSON Strings with specific objects per API

/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...

  • Look into the playgrounds file in the repository to have a more interactive way of experimenting with the REST APIs.

  • Look at the examples folder for sample json responses.

  • Alternately, CORE.js contains JSDoc documentation for the response and return requests payloads for each endpoint.

License

All source code in Players-Cloud is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.