Installing Youtube Direct

Youtube Direct is a new tool from Google/Youtube that makes it easier for media organizations or websites to request users to submit video clips, review submitted clips, and possibly re-broadcast these clips, just like CNN’s iReport.  It allows websites to embed Youtube’s upload functionality with ease, includes moderation panel to approve or deny submitted clips, and provides a link back to the website when videos are viewed on Youtube.

Here is a summary of my attempt to install Youtube Direct (YTD). YTD is designed to run  on Google App Engine (GAE) so you need to have a GAE account. Don’t worry, it’s free. After getting one, I downloaded the source and prepared it to be deployed in GAE. To do this, there are several things that need to be configured. One is to have Eclipse and the related Google Plugin.

Installing Eclipse. Download Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers from the Eclipse project website. The file is eclipse-jee-galileo-SR1-win32.zip, which is about 190MB. Extract the eclipse directory from the zip file. This directory contains the eclipse.exe executable, which runs Eclipse.

Install Google Plugin for Eclipse. Run Eclipse. Then select the Help menu and choose Install New Software.. menu item. In the Work with text box, enter the following URL: http://dl.google.com/eclipse/plugin/3.5. Click the Add button and then the OK button, keeping the name blank as it will be retrieved automatically from the site. Next, click the triangle next to “Plugin” and “SDKs”. Check the boxes next to “Google Plugin for Eclipse 3.5” and “Google App Engine Java SDK.” You can also include the “Google Web Toolkit SDK” if you like. Click the Next button and accept the terms of service to install the plugin. When the installation is complete, restart Eclipse and the plugin is installed.

Install subclipse to manage SVN checkout. Subclipse can be found here. To install it in Eclipse, open Eclipse and click the Help menu. Select Install New Software menu item. In the Work with text box, enter the following URL: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x. Click Add button. Follow the same process as in Step 2. This time selecting Subclipse from the available options. Restart Eclipse to complete the installation.

Download the source code. Now, you are ready to download the YTD source code. In Eclipse, select File menu, then click the Import menu item. In the Import dialog box, click the small triangle next to SVN, and then select Checkout Projects from SVN. Click Next button. From the Checkout from SVN dialog box, choose Create a new repository location. Click Next. Specify the URL as follows: http://youtube-direct.googlecode.com/svn/tags/20091113. Click Next. Select the folder to be checkout by highlighting http://youtube-direct.googlecode.com/svn/tags/20091113. Click Finish. A new project called ytd[tags/20091113] should appear in the Project Explorer after Eclipse completed downloading the source code.

Copy war/WEB-INF/appengine-web_DEFAULT.xml into war/WEB_INF/appengine-web.xml. Edit this file. Put within the <application> tag the registered App Engine instance name of your application. Specify the version of the application within the <version> tag. Replace the value of com.google.ytd.YTDeveloperKey property with your registered Youtube developer key. If you don’t have a developer key, get one here.

Run the application by clicking the Run action in Eclipse. If everything is working fine, you should have a server running at http://localhost:8080/. While still in Eclipse, deploy the application to GAE by clicking the Deploy App Engine Project button in the toolbar.

At first, I encountered several errors. I didn’t have a clue why. When I tried to deploy the application to GAE, it failed because it cannot find javac in the path. As it turned out, I needed to set Java in Windows –> Preferences –> Java –> Installed JREs to the installed Java SDK, not just the JRE. Any way, after setting Java to the SDK,  all the errors disappeared and the application worked and I was able to deploy it to GAE.

GAE dashboard. Go to the admin panel of YTD by visiting http://YOUR_APP.appspot.com/admin. From this panel, you can create new assignments, moderate submitted videos, etc. You can also get the codes that you can paste into a page in your website to enable video submission for each assignment.

That’s it! I still have to see how this works. You can also check the Youtube Direct Getting Started Guide for more details. Till next post.