October 21, 2005
Video Search To Go!
As I eagerly await the arrival of my brand-spanking-new 60gb white
Video iPod (for research
purposes only, I assure my manager), I’ve been thinking about how I
can fill my new device up with content, and I imagine many of you are
doing the same.
Since I wanted to fill my new gadget as quickly as possible with
video files found with Yahoo!
Video Search, I realized that this would be a good time to mention
that you can use the Media
RSS feed from our
href="http://developer.yahoo.net/search/video/V1/videoSearch.html">Web
Services API to easily pull in Yahoo! Video Search results as a
video podcast with
href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/">iTunes 6, and from there you
can move them to your iPod. (So you can still use this feature with
iTunes 6 even if your Video iPod hasn’t arrived yet).
Here’s what you need to do:
Step 1. Enter the video search search term you
want results for (for example, “stunts”) into our handy Media RSS feed
generator below and watch as the feed URL automagically appears.
Yahoo! Video Search RSS URL Generator
To
subscribe to the RSS feed for the above search,
use this URL:
height="17" alt="View RSS Feed" border="0"/>
To learn more about this RSS feed and how to customize the results
(for example, you might want to restrict your results to only MPEG or
Quicktime files), or how to use our API for your own projects, check
out the
href="http://developer.yahoo.net/search/video/V1/videoSearch.html">Yahoo!
Video Search Web Services API.
Step 2. Take the RSS feed URL that just appeared
above and copy it to your clipboard.
Step 3. Fire up iTunes 6, and under the “Advanced”
menu choose “Subscribe to Podcast”. Paste the URL you copied from
step 2 into the window. You should see this:
Step 4. That’s it! You’ll see the downloadable
video files that we’ve found online as results to your video search
listed as the podcast “Yahoo! Video: stunts” (or whatever your search
term was), and iTunes 6 will begin automatically downloading video
files for your query. (don’t forget to click the arrow next to your
“podcast” name and click all the “Get” buttons for the video files
you’re interested in to make iTunes download them).
Once downloaded, you can view your new video files in the Videos
section of iTunes 6, and fill your Video iPod up with them to your
heart’s delight. Enjoy!
We already feature these feeds as autodiscoverable RSS feeds in
Yahoo! Video Search result pages (those of you with
href="http://toolbar.yahoo.com/">Yahoo! Toolbar or
href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/">Firefox may have
noticed this already), so if you have an RSS aggregator that supports
Media RSS and/or RSS enclosures, you can use these feeds to
automatically download the top video search results for your query as
well!
Andy Volk
Product Manager, Yahoo! Video Search
Is there any way to restrict the search by file type, since the iPod can only play H.264 and MPEG4 movies?
You can restrict to MPEG files only by adding the &format=mpeg parameter (the API doesn’t currently support more specific restrictions like MPEG-4 or H.264). We’ve added this paramter to the URL generator on this blog post so the MPEG format restriction is in place by default.
Users of other portable video devices (or who are just watching their video on iTunes) take note: you can adjust this format flag to restrict to your desired filetype (or include all of them). the various modes are described in the Video Search Web Services documentation at http://developer.yahoo.net/search/video/V1/videoSearch.html
Great tip. However, I noticed that iTunes only gets the first 5-7 results of the search. How can I get the rest?
Andy, huge kudos to you and the Yahoo video search team. This is really, really, really cool. So any chance of adding the “video iPod” parameter to ensure that any videos retrieved based on my search will sync over to and run on my new video iPod? Thanks!
Mac users can try this AppleScript to enter a search string and subscribe to the results… http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=yahoovideosearch
Nice! Kudos to Yahoo for this functionality, and to Doug for making it even easier (at least for us Mac-heads).
It’d be cool if people posted some good searches they came up with here. I did “Guitar Lessons” and “SNL” and both work great!
Very cool. I combined the video search with podcast search so you can get either a video RSS or a new podcast RSS.
You can see the service at http://castsource.com
A few replies to earlier posts:
Steve, good idea! For more ideas on video search terms to use, check out the “Popular Video Searches” module on the frontpage of Video Search at http://video.search.yahoo.com/ — when reading this list, refresh the page to see more popular video queries.
Xamevou, in order to see more video files, try adjusting the “results=” parameter (so see more files at once) and the “start=” parameter (to adjust the starting position of your results. By adjusting both parameters you can automatically download even more results! These parameters are also explained in the API docs at http://developer.yahoo.net/search/video/V1/videoSearch.html
Thanks for everyone for your positive feedback and great ideas / implementations. My “research” Video iPod arrives in a few days (I’m a sucker for the laser engraving), and I’m looking forward to trying this out on my own gadget!
How can I convert wmv videos to mpg or 3gp formats?
I just purchased Ipod 30 video and I download videos to iTunes but will not show up on Ipod. What am I doing wrong? Help
For those of you who are using other portable devices and want to restrict by multiple format types in a single query, we’ve added that ability to the Video Search Web Services API. You can check out the latest version of our Web Services API at http://developer.yahoo.net/search/video/V1/videoSearch.html
It is nice that you restrict the searches to MPEG, but it also pulls through MPG files which don’t work on an iPod. Is there something you can do about that?
Has anyone found a way to convert *.wmv videos to mpg or 3gp formats? If so please post. Thanks
Interesting to see how the people at Yahoo work.
Thanks for this helpfull information, l was also loking or the ways how to grab video feeds on web. thanks..
I am using the Nokia podcasting app on my Nokia e61 wich allows me to search for casts using a url to host the search. So I type is my search, press enter then will use the url. Is there a yahoo address that will do this?