is there a faster way to get a YouTube clip's title than this?

Question

Currently i'm using the following, which seems quite slow for multiple clips:

static function get_yt_title($clip_id){    
    $feedURL = 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/' . $clip_id;
    $entry = @simplexml_load_file($feedURL);
    if($entry){
        $video= new stdClass;
        $media = $entry->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/');
        $video->title = ucwords(strtolower($media->group->title));
        return $video->title;   
    }
    else{
        return FALSE;
    }

any more efficient methods than this for doing 5-10 clips at a time with php?

Answer 1

I don't think there is. As far as i can tell this is the recommended way to get meta data like that.

There's one other thing I can think of and that is scraping the html off of youtube.com, i can almost guarantee you it isn't faster and sure as hell isn't reliable.

Answer 2

Yes.

• Get a faster server.

• Minute, but clean your code

  static function get_yt_title($clip_id)
  {
      $entry = @simplexml_load_file('http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/' . $clip_id);
      return ($entry) ? ucwords(strtolower($entry->children('http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/')->group->title)) : false;
  }
  

Use JSON Feeds: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/?alt=json by appending the ?alt=json to the URI

Answer 3

If you do this a lot for the same clip id's you could cache the results on your server.