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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 Web Services API to easily pull in Yahoo! Video Search results as a video podcast with 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

Enter search term(s):
(the RSS feed URL will be shown here once you enter search term(s) above)

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 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 Yahoo! Toolbar or 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

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Comments

Is there any way to restrict the search by file type, since the iPod can only play H.264 and MPEG4 movies?

Posted by: Josh Bancroft | October 21, 2005 02:46 PM

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

Posted by: Andy Volk | October 21, 2005 03:00 PM

Great tip. However, I noticed that iTunes only gets the first 5-7 results of the search. How can I get the rest?

Posted by: xamevou | October 22, 2005 11:30 AM

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!

Posted by: Steve Haney | October 22, 2005 12:18 PM

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

Posted by: Doug Adams | October 22, 2005 05:11 PM

Nice! Kudos to Yahoo for this functionality, and to Doug for making it even easier (at least for us Mac-heads).

Posted by: FreeiPodGuy.com | October 23, 2005 02:17 PM

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!

Posted by: Steve | October 23, 2005 03:07 PM

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

Posted by: Alex Nesbitt | October 23, 2005 03:54 PM

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!

Posted by: Andy Volk | October 24, 2005 03:25 PM

How can I convert wmv videos to mpg or 3gp formats?

Posted by: Morteza Fadaee | October 25, 2005 03:37 AM

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

Posted by: Louis Arredondo | October 27, 2005 07:38 AM

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

Posted by: Andy Volk | December 7, 2005 03:19 PM

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?

Posted by: Lane | January 1, 2006 09:39 AM

Has anyone found a way to convert *.wmv videos to mpg or 3gp formats? If so please post. Thanks

Posted by: Jim Rockingham | March 15, 2006 01:12 PM

Interesting to see how the people at Yahoo work.

Posted by: Frank | August 4, 2006 04:43 AM

Thanks for this helpfull information, l was also loking or the ways how to grab video feeds on web. thanks..

Posted by: recep | March 26, 2007 01:52 AM

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?

Posted by: David Link | April 15, 2007 02:17 PM