Getting Started With phpViddler Part 1: Listing Videos

Over the next couple weeks, Colin and I are going to be guiding you through how to use Viddler’s API with phpViddler, the PHP wrapper for our API functions. We’ll be covering everything from embedding videos to registering new users, so keep checking back!

Today, I’ll be covering how to list videos using the Viddler API and phpViddler using the functions videos_listbyuser, videos_listbytag, and videos_listfeatured.

Getting Set up

To start using the Viddler API, you’ll need to get an API key, which you can get by filling out this form. Once you’ve received your API key, go ahead and download phpViddler from our wiki. Now onto the actual code. To get phpViddler going, you’re going to need to add the following to your script:

<?php
  include_once('phpviddler.php');
 
  $viddler = new Phpviddler();
  $viddler->apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';
?>

So what happened here? We included the ‘phpviddler.php’ file, which houses the Phpviddler class. Next, we created a new instance of the Phpviddler class called $viddler, and then finally we set the API key for phpViddler to use.

Getting A User’s Videos

One of the first things you’ll likely want to do is get videos by a specific user. To accomplish this, we’ll be using the videos_listbyuser() function, which calls the viddler.videos.getByUser API method. We’ll then want to display each video using video_getEmbed(). Here’s the code:

$videos = $viddler->videos_listbyuser('username');
 
foreach($videos['video_list']['video'] as $video) {
  echo $viddler->video_getEmbed($video['id']);
}

Replace “username” with the username you’re looking up, the above code will retrieve and display all of their videos. First, let’s go over what each line does.

$videos = $viddler->videos_listbyuser('username');

Here we’re just calling the videos_listbyuser() function and passing “username” as an argument. If you look at the code for videos_listbyuser(), you’ll notice it actually takes 4 arguments: $user, $page, $per_page, and $sessionid. We’ll ignore $sessionid for now, since we’ll be covering sessions in a later post. $page and $per_page are used for limiting your results. So, if you want to page through results and have 5 per page, you’d use the following call:

$videos = $viddler->videos_listbyuser('username', 1, 5);

Just change $page to go to the next set of videos. Now, onto handling what Phpviddler returns:

Whenever you make a call using phpViddler, you’ll get an array returned. For instance, the above call, if you put in “winelibrarytv” for a user, you’ll get something like the following:

Array
(
    [video_list attr] => Array
        (
            [total] => 456
        )
 
    [video_list] => Array
        (
            [video] => Array
                (
                    [0] => Array
                        (
                            [author] => winelibrarytv
                            [id] => c866e246
                            [title] => episode445
                            [length_seconds] => 860
                            [description] => 
                            [view_count] => 1452
                            [upload_time] => 1208384555000
                            [comment_count] => 0
                            [url] => http://www.viddler.com/explore/winelibrarytv/videos/522/
                            [thumbnail_url] => http://cdn-ll-46.viddler.com/e2/thumbnail_2_c866e246.jpg
                        )
 
                    [1] => Array
                        (
                            [author] => winelibrarytv
                            [id] => add5b980
                            [title] => episode444
                            [length_seconds] => 1090
                            [description] => 
                            [view_count] => 17216
                            [upload_time] => 1208288599000
                            [comment_count] => 0
                            [url] => http://www.viddler.com/explore/winelibrarytv/videos/520/
                            [thumbnail_url] => http://cdn-ll-80.viddler.com/e2/thumbnail_2_add5b980.jpg
                        )
 
                )
 
        )
 
)

So, to iterate through the videos, you just need to use a foreach loop with the $videos['video_list']['video'] array:

foreach($videos['video_list']['video'] as $video) {
  echo $viddler->getEmbed($video['id']);
}

Passing the video id to $viddler->getEmbed() returns the proper embed code for the video.

Other Video List Functions

There are a couple other functions in phpViddler which behave similar to videos_listbyuser(): videos_listbytag() and videos_listfeatured().

videos_listbytag($tag, $page, $per_page)

This function utilizes the Viddler.videos.getByTag API call and can take 3 arguments, $tag, $page, and $per_page. $tag refers to the tag you’re searching by, and $page and $per_page behave the same as before. Here’s how you would use it to get all videos tagged with “metoday”:

$videos = $viddler->videos_listbytag('metoday');  
 
foreach($videos['video_list']['video'] as $video) {
  echo $viddler->getEmbed($video['id']);
}

videos_listfeatured()

Using this function enables you to get all the videos featured on the main Viddler Blog and uses the Viddler.videos.getFeatured API call. It doesn’t require any arguments, so you would just use it like this:

$videos = $viddler->videos_listfeatured();
 
foreach($videos['video_list']['video'] as $video) {
  echo $viddler->getEmbed($video['id']);
}

More to come

And, with that, we’ve finished our look at how to list videos with phpViddler. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be posting more tutorials, so make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and keep checking back! Also, if you ever have any questions, you can either leave a comment on the blog, or start a new thread in the Developers group.