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I recently made a Gameinfo service for spiller.no. It pulls in licenced gameinfo from our partner GameXplore though XML, and combines it with a search for related videoes from Youtube before it is presented on the page.
Example: FIFA STREET 3 Gameinfo – NRK Spiller
Youtube + Google Api
I made the Youtube part as a standalone page, and I include it with iframe. The reason I used Iframe was to make it easily reusable on other projects where it would fit to do something similar. I can for instance include it in my blog like this:
The page takes any search term as a GET, in this example it simply queries the youtube google api with the title of the game, with a few extra parameters (limit on the number of returned movies + a filter to remove «adult content»). I spent some time to create the XSLT to convert the xml from youtube/google to html, which is basically the same format for many of Googles services. I spent hours trying to find out if someone had created this already, but since I couldn’t find anything I had to create it myself. If you want to learn more about the youtube api I suggest starting at the Youtube Api group on Google Groups.
Open source
I have gotten some emails asking for the xslt for the youtube search, so I wanted to share it here:
This is my input, an example Youtube search
This is my example output:
https://pappmaskin.no/opensource/youtube/youtube.php
And here is the xslt I used to produce the above result:
https://pappmaskin.no/opensource/youtube/youtube3.xsl
If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.
Spam? Porn? Nope!
I was of course a little worried about what the youtube search would return, so when testing I went through quite a few games to see if the search returned movies that were unrelated to the gametitle, or contained nudity, but so far it looks really good, the youtube videos are actually the most interesting part of the service, so I’m really happy with it!
Blip.tv gametrailers
Yesterday I also added gametrailers to the mix, check out the gamepage for Assassins Creed for an example (click on the huge image at the top of the page) to make it play. I have bought a lisence for the wonderful Jeroen FLV Media Player which I use to present the gametrailers.
New gametrailers page, based on blip.tv
After that I spent a few minutes to create a new page that lists all the latest gametrailers published through GameXplore. I use the Jeroen Flv Media Player for this page as well. I created this yesterday, so I have to debug it a little bit before we start to promote it, and I also have to consider to increase the video buffer time, it seems like blip.tv har pretty slow servers. Right now there is a five second buffer, which should be more than enough, but even with broadband connection the video stops and buffers every five second. I don’t want people to wait forever for the video to buffer, but it is super irritating when the video stops every 5 seconds to buffer, so I have to decide what to do with it. One (hard) solution could be to download all the .flv to my server and play them from there… I am a big fan of blip.tv, they have the best player around, and their cross posting abilities are great (at least in theory, I still haven’t gotten it to work with this blog or myspace), so I am a little dissapointed to discover that the blip.tv servers (or lines?) are so slow to deliver video. (to Norway at least).
Thickbox
I love the Jquery javascript library, and I love Thickbox, so I decided to use it on the Screenshots on the site, popping them up in their own little box. I modidied the thickbox script and css slightly, replacing the animated loading gif and moved things around a little bit, and I am really happy about the outcome.
Add the spiller.no Gameinfo search to your browser
Spiller.no Gameinfo
Sjekk ut info, screenshots, trailers og anmeldelser på nye og kommende spill:
So there it is, hope you like it :)
To embed the search in your site:
<div class=»placeholder»><h3>Spiller.no Gameinfo</h3>
<span style=»color: #fff; width: 160px; font-size: 0.8em;»>Sjekk ut info, screenshots, trailers og anmeldelser på nye og kommende spill:</span>
<form id=»gamesearchform» name=»gamexploresearch» enctype=»application/x-www-form-urlencoded» method=»get» action=»http://www.nrk.no/spiller/gameinfo/?»>
<fieldset>
<input type=»hidden» value=»143″ name=»task»/>
<input style=»padding: 1px 0 2px 0; width:100px; border:1px solid #F7F7F7; border-width: 0pt 1px 1px 0pt;» type=»text» value=»» maxlength=»500″ name=»finn»/>
<button type=»submit»><span>Søk</span></button>
</fieldset>
</form></div>
