YouTube embeds without third party trackers.

tubemp is a tiny web-application which creates and serves thumbnail-images from YouTube embed-codes. These images link to the video and look like embedded videos.

It offers a replacement for embedding YouTube videos on your site. A replacement without third-party cookies and tracking “bugs” following your visitors.

Many countries (most notably the E.U-countries) don’t allow third party trackers on many of their sites. Many site-owners don’t want to place content on their websites that allows companies like Google to track their visitors.

Placing an image that looks like a YouTube embed, but served from your own domain, is a good solution for all this.

This tiny application aids in that.

Features

• Simple, friendly web-interface.
• Bookmarkable: tubemp.example.com/tags?v=D80QdsFWdcQ
• JSON API: tubemp.example.com/tags.json?v=D80QdsFWdcQ

Demo and examples

A demo installation can be found at http://tubemp.webschuur.com. NOTE that this is a demo; images will be wiped; when you include them from this service on your website, you will see broken images on your website at some point.

A hosted version is being developed and will replace the demo.

Example code:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D80QdsFWdcQ"><img src="http://tubemp.webschuur.com/thumbs/D8/D80QdsFWdcQ_overlay.png" alt="Tony Tribe , Red Red Wine"/></a>

Installation

The quick way

1. $ gem install tubemp
2. $ tubemp
3. Open a browser and visit localhost:4567

The long way (nginx and passenger)

todo.

JSON

You can get the result as JSON by adding .json to the tags page:

curl http://tubemp.example.com/tags.json?v=<youtube-id>

This returns a hash with the variations of the tags. For example, in PHP:

php > print_r(json_decode(file_get_contents("http://tubemp.example.com/tags.json?v=D80QdsFWdcQ")));
stdClass Object
(
    [basic] => <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D80QdsFWdcQ"><img src="http://localhost:9393/thumbs/D80QdsFWdcQ.png" alt="Tony Tribe , Red Red Wine"/></a>
    [overlay] => <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D80QdsFWdcQ"><img src="http://localhost:9393/thumbs/D80QdsFWdcQ_overlay.png" alt="Tony Tribe , Red Red Wine"/></a>
)

Author and Contributors

Bèr berkes Kessels

Requirements

Bundler installs everything, but for reference:

• Sinatra
• RMagick
• video_info by Thibaud Guillaume-Gentil
• rspec for testing and development

TODOS

• Write installation instructions for nginx
• Make a wordpress and Drupal module, using the JSON API.
• Make the gem mountable; current gem is a hack and e.g. stores the cached images in the gem-dir.