Flickr Video and the API

Overnight Flickr launched their video support, which I'm sure you can read about everywhere else. I'd like to note (as much for myself as anything) how to handle videos in the API.

As with the main site, videos are treated just as funny photos. As kellan explained on the Flickr API group, the API does just the same thing. There's a new "extras" parameter, "media", which returns either "photo" or "video". What isn't fully explained on the thread is how to display a video as a video, rather than as a static thumbnail (the way Flickr themselves do on, for example, pool pages).

The answer is to use the embedding code shown with each video. (You'll need to be logged in to see that page.) Seasoned API users will note that the photo ID and secret are in the code that Flickr gives you, so it looks like it'll be easy to check the media attribute for a photo, and either show just the image, or use the Flash code (with the appropriate substitiutions) to show a playable version. Unfortunately, if you can't figure out the aspect ratio of the image (typically by using the o_dims extra argument to methods like flickr.photos.search - and yes, it works for videos), you'll need to do an extra call (to flickr.photos.getSizes) to get those arguments for the <object> tag. (This is a problem for images, too, but I'd be happier leaving height and width tags out of an <img> than an <object> tag.)

In summary, then, supporting videos on Flickr through the API looks as if it should be straightforward, and in fact even if you do nothing then it'll work (albeit with videos treated as images). Nicely done.