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 @seengee says, the "right" way to do this is to look for the yt:state tag in the XML representation of a YouTube video via the YouTube API

To get this XML representation, you GET http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/VIDEO_ID (more details here). So implementing this check should be as easy as:

def valid_embed_link?
  doc = Hpricot(open("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/#{youtube_video_id}"))
  doc.at('yt:state').blank?
end

Unfortunately this yields false positives. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX6rC1krGp0 plays fine, but http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/MX6rC1krGp0 contains a yt:state tag. Therefore, I've gone with this hackier method:

def valid_embed_link?
  doc = Hpricot(open("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=#{youtube_video_id}"))
  return doc.at('.yt-alert-content').blank?
end