How can I retrieve YouTube video details from video URL using PHP?

Question

Using PHP, how can I get video information like title, description, thumbnail from a youtube video URL e.g.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4CRkpBGQzU

Answer 1

You can get data from youtube oembed interface in two formats: XML and JSON

Interface address: http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=youtubeurl&format=json

Use this PHP function to get data

 function get_youtube($url){

 $youtube = "http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=". $url ."&format=json";

 $curl = curl_init($youtube);
 curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 $return = curl_exec($curl);
 curl_close($curl);
 return json_decode($return, true);

 }

$url = // youtube video url 

// Display Data 
print_r(get_youtube($url));

Don't forget to enable extension=php_curl.dll in your php.ini