I'm currently trying to use the YouTube API as part of a jQuery plugin and I've run into a bit of a problem.
The way the YT api works is that you load the flash player and, when it's ready it will send a call back to a global function called onYouTubePlayerReady(playerId). You can then use that id combined with getElementById(playerId) to send javascript calls into the flash player (ie, player.playVideo();).
You can attach an event listener to the player with player.addEventListener('onStateChange', 'playerState'); which will send any state changes to another global function (in this case playerState).
The problem is I'm not sure how to associate a state change with a specific player. My jQuery plugin can happily attach more than one video to a selector and attach events to each one, but the moment a state actually changes I lose track of which player it happened in.
I'm hoping some example code may make things a little clearer. The below code should work fine in any html file.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/text+html;utf-8"/>
<title>Sandbox</title>
<link type="text/css" href="http://jqueryui.com/latest/themes/base/ui.all.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("jquery", "1.3.2");
google.load("jqueryui", "1.7.0");
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://swfobject.googlecode.com/svn/tags/rc3/swfobject/src/swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
(function($) {
$.fn.simplified = function() {
return this.each(function(i) {
var params = { allowScriptAccess: "always" };
var atts = { id: "ytplayer"+i };
$div = $('<div />').attr('id', "containerplayer"+i);
swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.youtube.com/v/QTQfGd3G6dg&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=ytplayer"+i,
"containerplayer"+i, "425", "356", "8", null, null, params, atts);
$(this).append($div);
});
}
})(jQuery);
function onYouTubePlayerReady(playerId) {
var player = $('#'+playerId)[0];
player.addEventListener('onStateChange', 'playerState');
}
function playerState(state) {
console.log(state);
}
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.secondary').simplified();
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<div class="secondary">
</div>
<div class="secondary">
</div>
<div class="secondary">
</div>
<div class="secondary">
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
You'll see the console.log() outputtin information on the state changes, but, like I said, I don't know how to tell which player it's associated with.
Anyone have any thoughts on a way around this?
EDIT: Sorry, I should also mentioned that I have tried wrapping the event call in a closure.
function onYouTubePlayerReady(playerId) {
var player = $('#'+playerId)[0];
player.addEventListener('onStateChange', function(state) {
return playerState(state, playerId, player); } );
}
function playerState(state, playerId, player) {
console.log(state);
console.log(playerId);
}
In this situation playerState never gets called. Which is extra frustrating.