I follow a few Let's Play series on youtube, but don't have enough spare time to watch all the videos as soon as they come out. I needed a way of keeping track of my series watching progress, and since I'm a software developer, pen and paper or a text document wasn't going to do it.
I am aware that youtube itself has some support for keeping track of which videos you have watched, and which you haven't, but I didn't find it working as well as I had hoped.
This simple webpage+database can be used to keep track of videos that you want to watch and supports an easy way to let the system automatically group videos in series together.
In order to use this you must have a webserver with PHP support and a MySQL database.
I use WAMP (XAMPP for other platforms) which contains all this. Note that there is absolutely no access control, so this should probably not be running anywhere online (without modifications at least). WAMP and XAMPP run localy on your machine.
- Put all files in a folder on your webserver (e.g. C:/wamp/www/youtube for a standard installation of WAMP)
- Import database.sql into your MySQL database (for WAMP or XAMPP use phpmyadmin)
- Edit in your credentials for the MySQL database in the top of index.php if you changed them from the defaults
##Usage Navigate to localhost/youtube (or whatever you called the directory) in your browser
To add a video to the system, simply drag a link to the video from Youtube and drop it anywhere on the page.
Series are created/added through the Add Series button in the top left. When you create a series you are presented with 3 fields;
Name, Author and Auto-identify search.
Name and Author are exactly what they sound like. Auto-identity search covers how you want the system to automatically identify videos as belonging to this series. E.g.:
You have a series using names like
* Let's play Skyrim - part 1
* Let's play Skyrim - part 2
* Let's play Skyrim - part 3
In auto-identity search you should put: "Let's play Skyrim"
To watch a video you simply press the thumbnail image. The video opens in a new window!
After watching you press Mark as watched.
##Missing features:
- Manual adding videos to series
- Removing videos from series
- Editing / removing series
##Known bugs:
- The automatic series identifier seems to dislike ticks (') in names and searches. I'm not sure why since I think I handle it properly.
##Libraries/APIs used:
- jQuery
- Twitter Bootstrap
- Google Youtube Video API (http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/VIDEO_ID?v=2)
- Google Youtube Video Thumbnail service ((https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/mqdefault.jpg))
(FYI: I discovered that the Youtube video API gets mad at you (403) if you send more than 100 request in very little time - just let it cool off for a bit)