Programmatically determine whether a Youtube video has been taken down

Question

I\'m getting most of the music on Rap Exegesis from YouTube (in the form of embedded players). Unfortunately, there\'s always the risk that one of the videos I\'m using will

Answer 1

As well as the "yt:state tag", the OP of the video may not allow it to be embedded. If the list of songs on the front page is coming from a playlist that you maintain on YouTube, for example, then a way to make sure you aren't getting songs that aren't embeddable is to include the "&format=5" parameter when retrieving your list. E.g.

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/8BCDD04DE8F771B2?v=2&format=5

Also, if you are worried about country-level restrictions, then use the "&restriction=[two-letter country code]" parameter.

See the 'Developer's Guide: Data API Protocol – API Query Parameters'.