I'm not so sure this is necessary. The YouTube plugin isn't meant to be a replacement for going to YouTube in your browser; it's meant to be a simple way to browse for videos. Adding those sorting options will take valuable space away from the rest of the interface, and most of them won't be particularly usable anyway, since (for example), the interface doesn't display upload dates, view counts or ratings.

Is there a better argument for including it than just "it would be nice"? Thanks.

The main use for it is finding the video you are after. Most YouTube stuff is in no way unique even though I generally want a specific video. By switching between sorting options you can sometimes find the video more easily. I guess really this points to lack of an "Open YouTube URL" menu item more than the sorting options.

A way of opening specific YouTube videos would be better, and has been requested a few times already.

If there is a way to get the actual file's URL from the webpage, then we could:
- "create" a new URI scheme (say youtube:)
- epiphany/the browser would pass us youtube://www.youtube.com/path/to/video
- in totem-pl-parser, we could transform this URL into the URI to the FLV file, using libgdata if necessary
- open and play the video

Or we could add the ability for plugins to handle specific URI schemes. In totem-object, we emit a signal with a retval:
gboolean (*handle_uri) (Totem *totem, const char *uri);

If any of the plugins are interested in overriding the loading, they can process the URI, and give us one back.

The second option is cleaner, but would still need to be async'ified.

Some implementations of YouTube id to .flv/.mp4 URL:

http://clive.sourceforge.net/
http://code.google.com/p/cclive/
http://bitbucket.org/rg3/youtube-dl/wiki/Home

I wonder if the URL mapping stuff belongs in the lower layers like GStreamer?

(In reply to comment #6)
> I wonder if the URL mapping stuff belongs in the lower layers like GStreamer?

The only thing this would be able to do is send a redirect to Totem with the real video URL. So Totem would indeed start playing the video, but the YouTube plugin wouldn't know anything about it, and you wouldn't see the related videos, etc.

Hmm, if GStreamer did the URL redirection, totem would still know the youtube URL (since it sent it to GStreamer) so it could still pass that to the youtube plugin, right?

I talked to the cclive author about turning it into a shared library. He said he was planning to write a C++ library with a C API, but doesn't have the time to do it at the moment. He said the --emit-csv option in clive and cclive would be useful to video downloader plugins in the meantime and that the epiphany video downloader extension uses it:

http://blauebirke.wordpress.com/

(In reply to comment #8)
> Hmm, if GStreamer did the URL redirection, totem would still know the youtube
> URL (since it sent it to GStreamer) so it could still pass that to the youtube
> plugin, right?

Yes, but that probably wouldn't help that much...

Forwarding a mail from the cclive author:

On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 15:36 +0300, Toni Gundogdu <legatvs@gmail.com> wrote:

> I couldn't tell if the totem folks had gone forth with something
> regarding your feature request. I'm in the process of writing a
> library with a C API for querying video links from Youtube and
> similar websites. How well this would suit the totem requirements
> is beyond me, though.
> 
> The initial release should take place by the end of this month,
> although they may want to wait out for 0.2.0.

Forwarding a mail from the cclive author:

The discussed library is now available for scrutiny. It isn't quite a "cclive-in-a-shared-library" but should help the cause nonetheless. cclive is planned to switch to use this library eventually.

Home: http://quvi.googlecode.com/
Repo: http://repo.or.cz/w/quvi.git
Docs: http://quvi.googlecode.com/svn/docs/html/index.html

*** Bug 631660 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

FWIW, it seems that DownloadHelper Firefox extension (1) works with YouTube and Dailymotion even if Flash plugin is not installed. Maybe it can be helpful to get the video url from a YouTube page ?

(1) https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/3006/

Oops(In reply to comment #13)
> FWIW, it seems that DownloadHelper Firefox extension (1) works with YouTube and
> Dailymotion even if Flash plugin is not installed. Maybe it can be helpful to
> get the video url from a YouTube page ?
> 
> (1) https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/3006/

Caution : i've just noticed this is not free software

Totem can open specific videos in a number of websites, when totem-pl-parser is built with libquvi support. If the YouTube plugin was extended, it'd look for videos being opened, and get the information to load up related videos from there.

About the project to create a new URI scheme to pass either the name or the url of the video to totem-pl-parser (passing only the name would be great to me and maybe less complex than having to deal with the url ?) : this seems a must have to me (it would create a lot of opportunities to use Totem for YouTube videos) whereas it also seems to be quite complex/time cosumming.

Isn't it the kind of work that could be proposed for a GSoC ?

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