Free YouTube Video Info API (Title, Aspect Ratio, Thumbnail, Author) - Working 2024

Sep 04, 2024

Related to:: YouTube - YouTube API

Here’s a quick trick to get basic YouTube video info using the video ID and an official YouTube “API” URL, which gives us a fast response.

Basically, we’ll use the oembed endpoint, which is typically used to get the embed code from a given YouTube URL.

This is the URL, you just need to change the url= parameter or the ID of the video if you only have that.

https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHXi6JEPkcY&format=json

And this is the response we get, including some good information about the video:

• Title;
• Author name and URL;
• Video height and width (used to get the aspect ratio);
• Thumbnail URL and dimensions;
• Embed HTML code.

{
  "title": "Dicas Laravel - Seja mais produtivo e escreva menos código - Parte 1",
  "author_name": "Alan Rezende - Full Stack Developer",
  "author_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@AlanRezende",
  "type": "video",
  "height": 113,
  "width": 200,
  "version": "1.0",
  "provider_name": "YouTube",
  "provider_url": "https://www.youtube.com/",
  "thumbnail_height": 360,
  "thumbnail_width": 480,
  "thumbnail_url": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aHXi6JEPkcY/hqdefault.jpg",
  "html": "\u003Ciframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/aHXi6JEPkcY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen title=\"Dicas Laravel - Seja mais produtivo e escreva menos código - Parte 1\"\u003E\u003C/iframe\u003E"
}

I used the below function in PHP to get the info and return it as metadata.

 
public function handleYouTubeInfo() {
    $video = YouTubeVideo::find(1);
    $videoId = $this->extractYouTubeId($video->video_url);
    $metadata = $this->fetchYouTubeMetadata($videoId);
    // Metadata available here
}
 
private function fetchYouTubeMetadata($videoId)
{
    try {
        $url = "https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v={$videoId}&format=json";
        $response = file_get_contents($url);
        if ($response === false) {
            return null;
        }
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
        return null;
    }
 
    return json_decode($response, true);
}
 
private function extractYouTubeId($url)
{
    $pattern = '/(?:youtube\.com\/(?:[^\/]+\/.+\/|(?:v|e(?:mbed)?)\/|.*[?&]v=)|youtu\.be\/)([^"&?\/\s]{11})/i';
    if (preg_match($pattern, $url, $match)) {
        return $match[1];
    }
 
    return null;
}