Today we’ve just launched a new article How to: Encode High Quality Video for Viddler. We’ve had this article requested from us several times and we’re happy to finally offer it. Nothing too special in the article itself, really, no rocket science – however it is nice to have an easy to read reference on how to get the best out of your Viddler videos.

If you have any questions or would like to have something appended to the article, or would like to request a new article, please feel free to leave a comment.

This is where ViddlerPop!, a new bookmarklet we’re playing with, comes in and saves the day.  Now instead of keeping a browser tab open dedicated to a Viddler video, I can watch this video in its own window.

Here is a quick video demonstration of how this first version works.

Please leave us some feedback to let us know what you think of the bookmarklet, how you’d like it to improve, and if you find any bugs.  Thanks in advance!

Installation

To install ViddlerPop! just drag the ViddlerPop! link to your browser’s bookmarks bar – or, right-click and “Add to bookmarks”. I believe in Firefox it is right-click and “Bookmark this Link”.

Questions?  Fire away!

I think you’ll find, through these tutorials, that using phpViddler makes it dead simple to use Viddler’s APIs. Please leave feedback if you have any specific areas you’d like us to cover.

Authenticating a user

To authenticate a user you will need both the username and password of the user. For this example, we’ll say the username is my username, cdevroe, and the password will be a fake password of ‘password’.

There are a few important points to remember when authenticating a user using Viddler’s API, whether you use phpViddler or not. Each time you authenticate a user you are giving a sessionID representing a “session” for that username and password. If you are looking to log in a different user, you will need to re-authenticate the credentials to get another sessionID.

As we move forward with this series, you will learn more about where you use a sessionID to do things like changing meta data, uploading video, etcetera.

To start a new session, this is the code you will need to use once you have the username and password for the user.

<?php
// Authenticate the user, return array of response
$sessionResponse = $viddler->user_authenticate('cdevroe','password');
?>

By default, phpViddler will return a multi-dimensional array of the Viddler.users.auth API method.

Check for errors before you do anything. Typical authentication errors are that the username does not exist (error code 101), or the password provided is incorrect (error code 103).

Once you’ve determined there are no errors, you can now put the sessionID into a variable for use later. In our next parts, we’ll be using the sessionID in a number of ways.

<?php
// Store sessionID in variable.
$sessionID = $sessionResponse['auth']['sessionid'];
?>

Notes about sessions

SessionIDs expire after 15 minutes of inactivity. You should build your application with this in mind. For example, if you build an uploading tool, and the upload of a video file takes longer than 15 minutes, the session you are using to upload a video with will expire before your upload is finished. Don’t panic! All you need to do is ask for a new one and you’re all set.

(Super side note: If you come to a point in your code where you need a sessionID, you can quickly run any method that requires a sessionID to see if the session is still valid, if it isn’t, get a new one, and continue your code.)

In our next part, we’ll be covering the use of our Record with Webcam API and uploading video files.

If you have any questions about authenticating users, or sessions in general, feel free to ask.

Today, I’ll be covering how to list videos using the Viddler API and phpViddler using the functions videos_listbyuser, videos_listbytag, and videos_listfeatured.

Getting Set up

To start using the Viddler API, you’ll need to get an API key, which you can get by filling out this form. Once you’ve received your API key, go ahead and download phpViddler from our wiki. Now onto the actual code. To get phpViddler going, you’re going to need to add the following to your script:

<?php
  include_once('phpviddler.php');
 
  $viddler = new Phpviddler();
  $viddler->apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';
?>

So what happened here? We included the ‘phpviddler.php’ file, which houses the Phpviddler class. Next, we created a new instance of the Phpviddler class called $viddler, and then finally we set the API key for phpViddler to use.

Getting A User’s Videos

One of the first things you’ll likely want to do is get videos by a specific user. To accomplish this, we’ll be using the videos_listbyuser() function, which calls the viddler.videos.getByUser API method. We’ll then want to display each video using video_getEmbed(). Here’s the code:

$videos = $viddler->videos_listbyuser('username');
 
foreach($videos['video_list']['video'] as $video) {
  echo $viddler->getEmbed($video['id']);
}

Replace “username” with the username you’re looking up, the above code will retrieve and display all of their videos. First, let’s go over what each line does.

$videos = $viddler->videos_listbyuser('username');

Here we’re just calling the videos_listbyuser() function and passing “username” as an argument. If you look at the code for videos_listbyuser(), you’ll notice it actually takes 4 arguments: $user, $page, $per_page, and $sessionid. We’ll ignore $sessionid for now, since we’ll be covering sessions in a later post. $page and $per_page are used for limiting your results. So, if you want to page through results and have 5 per page, you’d use the following call:

$videos = $viddler->videos_listbyuser('username', 1, 5);

Just change $page to go to the next set of videos. Now, onto handling what Phpviddler returns:

Whenever you make a call using phpViddler, you’ll get an array returned. For instance, the above call, if you put in “winelibrarytv” for a user, you’ll get something like the following:

Array
(
    [video_list attr] => Array
        (
            [total] => 456
        )
 
    [video_list] => Array
        (
            [video] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [author] => winelibrarytv
                            [id] => c866e246
                            [title] => episode445
                            [length_seconds] => 860
                            [description] => 
                            [view_count] => 1452
                            [upload_time] => 1208384555000
                            [comment_count] => 0
                            [url] => http://www.viddler.com/explore/winelibrarytv/videos/522/
                            [thumbnail_url] => http://cdn-ll-46.viddler.com/e2/thumbnail_2_c866e246.jpg
                        )
 
                    [1] => Array
                        (
                            [author] => winelibrarytv
                            [id] => add5b980
                            [title] => episode444
                            [length_seconds] => 1090
                            [description] => 
                            [view_count] => 17216
                            [upload_time] => 1208288599000
                            [comment_count] => 0
                            [url] => http://www.viddler.com/explore/winelibrarytv/videos/520/
                            [thumbnail_url] => http://cdn-ll-80.viddler.com/e2/thumbnail_2_add5b980.jpg
                        )
 
                )
 
        )
 
)

So, to iterate through the videos, you just need to use a foreach loop with the $videos['video_list']['video'] array:

foreach($videos['video_list']['video'] as $video) {
  echo $viddler->getEmbed($video['id']);
}

Passing the video id to $viddler->getEmbed() returns the proper embed code for the video.

Other Video List Functions

There are a couple other functions in phpViddler which behave similar to videos_listbyuser(): videos_listbytag() and videos_listfeatured().

videos_listbytag($tag, $page, $per_page)

This function utilizes the Viddler.videos.getByTag API call and can take 3 arguments, $tag, $page, and $per_page. $tag refers to the tag you’re searching by, and $page and $per_page behave the same as before. Here’s how you would use it to get all videos tagged with “metoday”:

$videos = $viddler->videos_listbytag('metoday');  
 
foreach($videos['video_list']['video'] as $video) {
  echo $viddler->getEmbed($video['id']);
}

videos_listfeatured()

Using this function enables you to get all the videos featured on the main Viddler Blog and uses the Viddler.videos.getFeatured API call. It doesn’t require any arguments, so you would just use it like this:

$videos = $viddler->videos_listfeatured();
 
foreach($videos['video_list']['video'] as $video) {
  echo $viddler->getEmbed($video['id']);
}

More to come

And, with that, we’ve finished our look at how to list videos with phpViddler. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be posting more tutorials, so make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and keep checking back! Also, if you ever have any questions, you can either leave a comment on the blog, or start a new thread in the Developers group.

WPViddler was released via our Forums a few days ago and is already getting some positive feedback.  The theme is free for all registered users to Templamatic.

I’m hoping to see more of this type of development as we’d love to make it quick and easy for bloggers to get started using their Viddler accounts on their sites.

Update April 16, 2008:  There seemed to be a Safari bug in the code for this template.  An update has been issued as well as instructions for updating your theme if you downloaded and installed it already.