Show Youtube video source into HTML5 video tag?

I have created a realtively small (4.89 KB) javascript library for this exact functionality.

Found on my GitHub here: https://github.com/thelevicole/youtube-to-html5-loader/

It's as simple as:

<video data-yt2html5="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScMzIvxBSi4"></video>

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/thelevicole/[email protected]/dist/YouTubeToHtml5.js"></script>
<script>new YouTubeToHtml5();</script>

Working example here: https://jsfiddle.net/thelevicole/5g6dbpx3/1/

What the library does is extract the video ID from the data attribute and makes a request to the https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=. It decodes the response which includes streaming information we can use to add a source to the <video> tag.

UPDATE June 2021

YouTube have recently updated their API which has broken previous versions of this package. Please now use versions 4.0.1 and up! Updated example:

<video data-yt2html5="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScMzIvxBSi4"></video>

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/thelevicole/[email protected]/dist/YouTubeToHtml5.js"></script>
<script>new YouTubeToHtml5();</script>

https://jsfiddle.net/thelevicole/5g6dbpx3/2/

The <video> tag is meant to load in a video of a supported format (which may differ by browser).

YouTube embed links are not just videos, they are typically webpages that contain logic to detect what your user supports and how they can play the youtube video, using HTML5, or flash, or some other plugin based on what is available on the users PC. This is why you are having a difficult time using the video tag with youtube videos.

YouTube does offer a developer API to embed a youtube video into your page.

I made a JSFiddle as a live example: http://jsfiddle.net/zub16fgt/

And you can read more about the YouTube API here: https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference#Getting_Started

The Code can also be found below

In your HTML:

<div id="player"></div>

In your Javascript:

var onPlayerReady = function(event) {
    event.target.playVideo();  
};

// The first argument of YT.Player is an HTML element ID. 
// YouTube API will replace my <div id="player"> tag 
// with an iframe containing the youtube video.

var player = new YT.Player('player', {
    height: 320,
    width: 400,
    videoId : '6Dc1C77nra4',
    events : {
        'onReady' : onPlayerReady
    }
});

Step 1: add &html5=True to your favorite youtube url

Step 2: Find <video/> tag in source

Step 3: Add controls="controls" to video tag: <video controls="controls"..../>

Example:

<video controls="controls" class="video-stream" x-webkit-airplay="allow" data-youtube-id="N9oxmRT2YWw" src="http://v20.lscache8.c.youtube.com/videoplayback?sparams=id%2Cexpire%2Cip%2Cipbits%2Citag%2Cratebypass%2Coc%3AU0hPRVRMVV9FSkNOOV9MRllD&amp;itag=43&amp;ipbits=0&amp;signature=D2BCBE2F115E68C5FF97673F1D797F3C3E3BFB99.59252109C7D2B995A8D51A461FF9A6264879948E&amp;sver=3&amp;ratebypass=yes&amp;expire=1300417200&amp;key=yt1&amp;ip=0.0.0.0&amp;id=37da319914f6616c"></video>

Note there seems to some expire stuff. I don't know how long the src string will work.

Still testing myself.

Edit (July 28, 2011): Note that this video src is specific to the browser you use to retrieve the page source. I think Youtube generates this HTML dynamically (at least currently) so in testing if I copy in Firefox this works in Firefox, but not Chrome, for example.

This answer does not work anymore, but I'm looking for a solution.

As of . 2015 / 02 / 24 . there is a website (youtubeinmp4) that allows you to download youtube videos in .mp4 format, you can exploit this (with some JavaScript) to get away with embedding youtube videos in <video> tags. Here is a demo of this in action.

##Pros

• Fairly easy to implement.
• Quite fast server response actually (it doesn't take that much to retrieve the videos).
• Abstraction (the accepted solution, even if it worked properly, would only be applicable if you knew beforehand which videos you were going to play, this works for any user inputted url).

##Cons

• It obviously depends on the youtubeinmp4.com servers and their way of providing a downloading link (which can be passed as a <video> source), so this answer may not be valid in the future.

• You can't choose the video quality.

###JavaScript (after load)

videos = document.querySelectorAll("video");
for (var i = 0, l = videos.length; i < l; i++) {
    var video = videos[i];
    var src = video.src || (function () {
        var sources = video.querySelectorAll("source");
        for (var j = 0, sl = sources.length; j < sl; j++) {
            var source = sources[j];
            var type = source.type;
            var isMp4 = type.indexOf("mp4") != -1;
            if (isMp4) return source.src;
        }
        return null;
    })();
    if (src) {
        var isYoutube = src && src.match(/(?:youtu|youtube)(?:\.com|\.be)\/([\w\W]+)/i);
        if (isYoutube) {
            var id = isYoutube[1].match(/watch\?v=|[\w\W]+/gi);
            id = (id.length > 1) ? id.splice(1) : id;
            id = id.toString();
            var mp4url = "http://www.youtubeinmp4.com/redirect.php?video=";
            video.src = mp4url + id;
        }
    }
}

###Usage (Full)

<video controls="true">
        <source src="www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bGNuRtlqAQ" type="video/mp4" />
    </video>

Standard video format.

###Usage (Mini)

<video src="youtu.be/MLeIBFYY6UY" controls="true"></video>

A little less common but quite smaller, using the shortened url youtu.be as the src attribute directly in the <video> tag.