How to programatically get a youtube movie trailer

I really liked Youtube’s Gdata API, I had it all working nicely. As you can see from that post I had a nice popup overlay on Sharemovi.es with the movie trailer video embedded. Till it broke … Gdata is gone. So needed to fix it …

Alternative

Turns out that you can get the trailer via themoviedb API. See here: you need themoviedb’s movieID and call the /videos method. When testing it gave me 5 trailers. I will show you the PHP code I use to query the API and how to convert the youtube to HMTL you can embed into your page. I use the Jquery boxy plugin for the overlay (see printscreen at the bottom).

Code

 $ more trailer.php 
<?php
if (!isset($_GET["id"])){
  echo "Please call with movie ID";
  return;
}
include 'libs/functions.php';
$id = $_GET["id"];
if(!is_numeric($id)){
  echo "Need numeric ID";
  return;
}
// Gdata died, themoviedb is your friend though
// https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5451ec02c3a3680245005e3c
$res = queryApi3("movie", $id, "videos");
//print_r($res); -- stdClass Object notation
$youtubeId = $res->results[0]->key; // monitor if first trailer is always OK enough
echo getTrailerSnippet($youtubeId, '640', '385', 1, 1);                                                                                                                  
?>

Below the functions I use. Essentially you need to curl this URL: http://api.themoviedb.org/3/movie/<movieID>/videos?api_key=<YOUR_API_KEY> and json_decode the results. The function args make it more generic so you can use it for other API calls too (as I do for my movie site).

$ more libs/functions
..
..
function queryApi3($category, $id, $method) {
  // query and lang optional, only needed for search
  $key = getKey();
  $query = "http://api.themoviedb.org/3"; 
  if($category != '') $query .= "/$category"; 
  if($id != '') $query .= "/$id";
  if($method != '') $query .= "/$method"; 
  $query .= "?api_key=$key";
  // use curl, not file_get_contents
  // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/555523/file-get-contents-vs-curl-what-has-better-performance
  $results = useCurl($query);
  return json_decode($results);
}
..
..
function useCurl($url) {  
  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
  $results = curl_exec($ch);
  $headers = curl_getinfo($ch);
  $error_number = curl_errno($ch);
  $error_message = curl_error($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
  return $results;
}
..
..
function getTrailerSnippet($youtubeId, $width, $height) {
  if( $youtubeId ) {
    echo "<iframe class='youtube-player' type='text/html' width='$width' height='$height' src='http://www.youtube.com/embed/$youtubeId?autoplay=1' frameborder='0'>";               
  } else {
    echo "No Trailer found";
  }
}

On the main page I have a link to this script with a GET variable called “id” that receives the movieID. The class “boxy” is required to make the Jquery boxy overlay work.

echo "<a href='trailer.php?id=$movieId' class='boxy trailerOverlay' title='Trailer of ".str_replace("'","",$dataMovie['title'])."'><img src='i/youtube.png'></a>";

Result

And we’re good again:

http://sharemovi.es/movie/206647-spectre

I. see red trailer button

II. when clicked: