YouTube API Blog

My Google interview experience:

Google Internship January 2008: Had a phone screen. First question as I heard it: “Given a binary tree tell me if it is a binary tree?” I was a bit confused and said I didn’t understand the question and requirements. Given A tell me if it’s A. Yes? The interviewers response to my confusion was: “Do you even know what a binary tree is?” Yes, I do. When he restated the question as “given a binary tree tell me if it’s a valid binary search tree” I understood the requirements efffed up something in the implementation though. Then was asked to do another problem. Something with number sequence and iteration. Got told “division is slow” so don’t use it. Couldn’t see a solution without division on the spot. Then got asked if I know about Java serialization. My response: “implements Serializable” and you can write out or read in objects but I have never really used it in any serious way before.

I got the reject. Which I expected more or less. Kind of frustrating since I felt the interview was pretty much done in the first few minutes since I was asked: “do you even know what a binary tree is.” Kind of an uphill battle from my perspective.

YouTube February 2010:
Applied for YouTube because I saw an ad in gmail. Why not.

2 phone interviews. And 4 onsite.

I thought I did ok solved everything to the best of my ability. Frustrated that I didn’t get it. Really enjoyed it. Seemed like a lot of fun. One interviewer told me my current job sounded boring.…

I have run into all the same problems, also I don't like the loss of full screen video. HTML5 video is simply not an adequate replacement for Flash, end of story.

I've found that many people who believe things work fine joined the HTML5 opt-in trial, but don't realize that HTML5 only works on some videos and Flash is still being used for others. Most videos seem to be only available in Flash even with the trial enabled. Right clicking on the video reveals which it is if there is any doubt.

A YouTube engineer discussed some of the issues a couple years back: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html. At the time Hulu had similar comments about HTML5 video capabilities: http://blog.hulu.com/2010/05/13/pardon-our-dust/. A more recent post from a few months ago by YouTube staff on the subject is here: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/11/youtubes-html5-player-gets-better.html

"Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post."

This has been discussed on the WebM blog:

"The WebM/VP8 hardware decoder implementation has already been licensed to over twenty partners and is proven in silicon. We expect the first commercial chips to integrate our VP8 decoder IP to be available in the first quarter of 2011."

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html

"They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms."

Incidentally, months ago they've also blogged about why they'll keep YouTube using Flash, rather than HTML5:
http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

I do not know how Hulu Plus is steaming data to the iP(ad)hone, but there has to be some sort of encryption. The reason so many streaming sites use Adobe Flash and/or Microsoft SilverLight is because they offer it. Youtube wrote a blog post about HTML5 and included some insight on this[1].

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Content Protection :: YouTube doesn't own the videos that you watch - they're owned by their respective creators, who control how those videos are distributed through YouTube. For YouTube Rentals, video owners require us to use secure streaming technology, such as the Flash Platform's RTMPE protocol, to ensure their videos are not redistributed. Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this.

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[1] http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

The code on your GitHub, for the most part, seems fine.

One thing I can say is don't use exec[1] if you can avoid it:

$string = 'rm /var/www/Giftest/*.gif';
exec($string);

While there's nothing * technically* wrong, it's platform specific and I think it would be better to use PHP's unlink[2] function. Also, sorry if this is wrong, I haven't looked at the regex but it seems your parsing YouTube URLs? Have you looked at oEmbed[3] - it may be an easier way to accomplish what your doing? You can use it with json_decode[4] to get an object.

[1] https://github.com/Machtap/GiffyTube/blob/master/download.php

[2] http://php.net/manual/en/function.unlink.php

[3] http://apiblog.youtube.com/2009/10/oembed-support.html

[4] http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php

> Angus: Youtube's Flash implementation uses more battery than their HTML5 equivalent on my machine.

Apologies for this, it seems to have evidence in it: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

It's hard for me to compare HTML5 to Flash if the Flash version has a truckload of abilities being used that cannot be utilized in HTML5. What's so hard to understand about this?

Does the MacBook fan only come on for Flash? It seems unlikely. Seems like it might engage for CPU-intensive processes that contain audio, video, Internet access (WiFi or 3G isn't cheap on the battery) and a mixture of other features.

I'm not trying to get any one to agree to Flash being better. I just don't see an equal argument. Ever.