Reducing taps for YouTube videos in feed

[Jay Goodman Tamboli]

In one of my feeds I have some YouTube videos, which means the current interface requires the user to tap the item on the home screen, then tap the image or title again in the article view, and then the YouTube app loads.

Instead, I'd like the user to be able to tap the item on the home screen and then see the appropriate video on m.youtube.com inside the app. I tried creating a test RSS file that had iframe tags to load the appropriate page from m.youtube.com. An example would be this:

<description>&lt;iframe src =&quot;http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XKuvULtITqE&quot; width=&quot;500&quot; height=&quot;500&quot;&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/iframe&gt;</description>

One problem is that this takes time to load, so I'd have to do some trickery to see if the user is offline.

More importantly, though, TapLynx doesn't seem to constrain the iframe to the bounds I set. Even though it's supposed to be a 500px x 500px box, YouTube is resizing it to be bigger, so the user has to scroll left and right to see the whole thing.

Does anyone know if there's anything I can do to constrain the iframe to 500x500? Or is there a better way to go about this?

Thanks in advance.

/jgt
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[Jay Goodman Tamboli]

On Jan 13, 2011, at 10:48, Jay Goodman Tamboli wrote:

> In one of my feeds I have some YouTube videos, which means the current interface requires the user to tap the item on the home screen, then tap the image or title again in the article view, and then the YouTube app loads.
>
> Instead, I'd like the user to be able to tap the item on the home screen and then see the appropriate video onm.youtube.com inside the app.

I solved my own problem.

In case anyone else is curious, the solution is to use the iframe code YouTube offers on its own web page. My RSS file is going to have code like this:

<description>&lt;iframe title=&quot;YouTube video player&quot; class=&quot;youtube-player&quot; type=&quot;text/html&quot; width=&quot;480&quot; height=&quot;360&quot; src=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/embed/XKuvULtITqE&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;</description>

Now I need to figure out how to get Yahoo! Pipes to generate this.

One bug: if the user swipes left or right to get the a different post, the audio continues to play.

[Jay Goodman Tamboli]

On Jan 13, 2011, at 16:30, Jay Goodman Tamboli wrote:

> In case anyone else is curious, the solution is to use the iframe code YouTube offers on its own web page. My RSS file is going to have code like this:
>
> <description>&lt;iframe title=&quot;YouTube video player&quot; class=&quot;youtube-player&quot; type=&quot;text/html&quot; width=&quot;480&quot; height=&quot;360&quot; src=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/embed/XKuvULtITqE&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;</description>
>
> Now I need to figure out how to get Yahoo! Pipes to generate this.

As a further comment, it looks like Yahoo! Pipes won't let me put iframes in my output (or I can't figure out how to do it). I guess I'm just going to have to deal with the YouTube app launch unless I want to write my own feed-mangling code on our server.

[Jay Goodman Tamboli]

On Jan 13, 2011, at 18:14, Jay Goodman Tamboli wrote:

> As a further comment, it looks like Yahoo! Pipes won't let me put iframes in my output (or I can't figure out how to do it). I guess I'm just going to have to deal with the YouTube app launch unless I want to write my own feed-mangling code on our server.

In case anyone else is having the same problem, the best solution I've found so far is to use Yahoo! Pipes's Regex module to replace www.youtube.com with m.youtube.com in item.description. Doing that means that a tap on the video in the Article view will open a new WebView with the mobile version of the YouTube page. It does still take an additional tap to play the video, and then two taps on Done to get back to the home screen, but at least it doesn't switch to another app.