The purpose of this repository:

1. allow developers to show embed acceptable videos on their website
2. and never show blocked videos which display super ugly static.

Here are some of the links that we will be testing:

1. Put the below links in your browser's address bar to see the website output:

working video:    https://www.youtube.com/embed/durCuF6jb8k?rel=0&autoplay=1
err disabled:     https://www.youtube.com/embed/O0EXiT4nYQ0?rel=0&autoplay=1
err NBCU blocked: https://www.youtube.com/embed/nn4tP7ogWIA?rel=0&autoplay=1
err VIVO blocked: https://www.youtube.com/embed/p_IwENcMPOA?rel=0&autoplay=1

bonus ... PLAYLISTS!: https://www.youtube.com/embed/?list=PLOcTEsKp5qpV7pbtiGeLAjlmD086bqymr&rel=0&autoplay=1

The tricky part of embedded youtube videos:

Even if you set the video to autoplay
the error message will be inside the embedded video and not in the HTML output from a curl request.

Upon checking network tab in dev tools you can find the request that has the information.
But how can we get access to it with a curl command?

How to trouble shoot the browser to solve the problem:

1. cmd opt i, to open dev tools
2. click network tab
3. refresh your browser
4. right click "get_video_info" network request
5. hover over "Copy"
6. select "Copy as cURL"
7. pasting this into the terminal was not very helpful to myself,
   

request: curl 'https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?html5=1&video_id=O0EXiT4nYQ0&cpn=EA-bHhHgNZitU2bm&eurl&el=embedded&hl=en_US&sts=17555&lact=8&c=WEB_EMBEDDED_PLAYER&cver=20180125&cplayer=UNIPLAYER&cbr=Chrome&cbrver=63.0.3239.132&cos=Macintosh&cosver=10_12_6&width=409&height=800&authuser=0&ei=xgtuWsGfE8-M8gSTpa9w&iframe=1' -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9' -H 'x-youtube-client-version: 20180125' -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.132 Safari/537.36' -H 'x-chrome-uma-enabled: 1' -H 'accept: */*' -H 'referer: https://www.youtube.com/embed/O0EXiT4nYQ0' -H 'x-youtube-client-name: 56' -H 'authority: www.youtube.com' -H 'cookie: HSID=A1cNSpElLFuAIz4u-; SSID=AF0D72G9-Y9yfe4i-; APISID=gOAezz65T1SbvbZY/AY7IeENUJ06_aI2s7; SAPISID=F9grmZuvfbxSO9jh/ASsUsC-NRS1kUWaxV; VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=U0qF_xHZsMM; LOGIN_INFO=AICDL0QwRQIgTKE-Nl60qsJiO7M9LE-7sKg4PDqQAwzxvzkqcgkjKMoCIQCstCLmEbtCW8NyhU1-Pe1mXmiE8vJwIKS5UpZEMlxpYQ:QUpCWWozcmw0b2g5bzI0bGhkQ0k5a2I1TDQxdkp5LWdzUHZMVUx4aVJiMDlRZDNsNkFwUHF3aVgwaFFrNk04bmU5bHNIQUNWS1hjQmhVbV9CcUU2SGZtWlh3RFRJdEFpYU5IOFZNUkgwWVU1RTJVSEtLdzBZN21FQzcwTlNfX1M1UkdQTFRjLVY3ei1YTWxrVV9vRGtndDJ6QmRyWHdhV2xMSGJhZGw4YkYxdTlmU3RBV1k0NTJ3; SID=kwUYIPi23MSshmthATNtk_332Ji2GFwZ33HjaeXrfeJC7lA27yYsO3PWqFDQ6k6MHwsLXA.; _ga=GA1.2.508661757.1517088456; _gid=GA1.2.1456931995.1517088456; PREF=al=en&f5=30; YSC=Ze7qPkV2bYk; llbcs=0' -H 'x-client-data: CKu1yQEIhbbJAQijtskBCMS2yQEI+pzKAQipncoBCIafygEIqKPKAQ==' --compressed

response:

???t,w????}G?=????1̱??m?D<??Ǯw??B'?'7???u??@ł?Xs0n?X???k?2?d?6?%?w??bs?O[?????:BЁ???VP???>??G?B?????WIC^??? t\Z?t??A?????A???A? 

8. Well that response is a bunch of junk. Reduce the curl command into smaller parts to see if the results are better. When you remove --compressed and other details the response will match the expected response: request:

   curl 'https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?html5=1&video_id=O0EXiT4nYQ0'

9. It works! but now we need to compare with other youtube videos to see what needs changing to get correct info every time.

curl 'https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?html5=1&video_id=O0EXiT4nYQ0';
curl 'https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?html5=1&video_id=nn4tP7ogWIA';

If a video has an error for embeded it shows an errorcode in the response. 🔥

11. Youtube does not enable CORS on their server for the get_video_info route.

12. Thankfully I can use a reverse proxy that I built. An api that makes requests on the server side. Thankfully my server is enabled to accept requests from another application running in a browser. 🆒

Update: referrer was not needed for this project.
13) Looking deeper on the network tab of dev tools, the request uses a referrer...
14) lets write a post to the get info url with a header using referer of the video I want the info regarding.

test_ifEmbedded_youtube_video_works_before_putting_one

Here is a request that does not play as an embedded video

curl -H 'referer: https://www.youtube.com/embed/O0EXiT4nYQ0' 'https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?html5=1&video_id=O0EXiT4nYQ0'

Here is a request that does play an embedded video

curl -H 'referer: https://www.youtube.com/embed/nn4tP7ogWIA' 'https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?html5=1&video_id=nn4tP7ogWIA'

Money Shot 💸 🤑 🤑

Resultant Abstracted request for testing using my mac computer:

checkVideo(){
  VIDEO=$1
  curl -H "referer: https://www.youtube.com/embed/$VIDEO" \
   "https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?html5=1&video_id=$VIDEO"
}
checkVideo durCuF6jb8k
checkVideo O0EXiT4nYQ0
checkVideo nn4tP7ogWIA
checkVideo p_IwENcMPOA

bonus ... PLAYLISTS!: https://www.youtube.com/embed/?list=PLOcTEsKp5qpV7pbtiGeLAjlmD086bqymr&index=3&rel=0&autoplay=1

## paremeters to play the third video in a playlist
?list=PLOcTEsKp5qpV7pbtiGeLAjlmD086bqymr&index=3&rel=0&autoplay=1

Links related to playlists:

## returns a json object with all of the items in the list.
curl 'https://www.youtube.com/list_ajax?style=json&action_get_list=1&list=LLSCWFSK6rEm7Pg0yxD61pOA'

## uses the video_id grabbed from the current video index looking up the list_ajax result.
curl 'https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?html5=1&video_id=ILVqgOlntLM'

## install jq for json parsing: 
brew install jq

## for video ?list=PLOcTEsKp5qpV7pbtiGeLAjlmD086bqymr&index=3&rel=0&autoplay=1
videoId=$(curl -s 'https://www.youtube.com/list_ajax?style=json&action_get_list=1&list=PLOcTEsKp5qpV7pbtiGeLAjlmD086bqymr' | jq .video[3].encrypted_id | xargs)
echo $videoId ## output: "d86HgL1zU-E"
checkVideo $videoId

Woot, done. 😎

Additional documentation, links to the youtube iframe api:

the documentation did not solve the problem that this repo tackles.
https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference
https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters