Android - WebView not playing YouTube videos

Question

I have some WebView code with which I am trying to play YouTube videos on a YouTube channel. But all it is doing is showing the spinner icon on a video and never actually starting the video. Would anyone know how to fix that?

public class YoutubeActivity extends Activity
{
    WebView webview = null;

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) 
    {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);   

        webview = new WebView(this);
        webview.getSettings().setAppCacheEnabled(false);
        webview.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
        webview.setInitialScale(1);
        webview.getSettings().setPluginState(PluginState.ON);

        webview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
            @Override
            public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, String url) {
                view.loadUrl(url);
                return true;
            }
        });


        WebSettings webSettings = webview.getSettings();
        webSettings.setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
        webSettings.setBuiltInZoomControls(true);
        //webSettings.getMediaPlaybackRequiresUserGesture();
        webSettings.setAllowContentAccess(true);
        webSettings.setEnableSmoothTransition(true);
        webSettings.setLoadsImagesAutomatically(true);
        webSettings.setLoadWithOverviewMode(true);
        webSettings.setSupportZoom(true);
        webSettings.setUseWideViewPort(true);

        setContentView(webview);
        webview.loadUrl("http://www.youtube.com/g33ktalktv");           
    }

    public void onBackPressed ( )
    {
        //Class.forName("com.***.HTML5WebView").getMethod("onPause", (Class[]) null).
        //invoke(html5WebView, (Object[]) null);
        webview.clearView();
    } 

    @Override
    public void onStop()
    {
       super.onStop();
       // your code

       webview.clearView();
    }
}

And this is the manifest setting:

<activity
    android:name="YoutubeActivity"
    android:label="Some string" 
    android:hardwareAccelerated="true"/>

Thannk in advance!

Answer 1

Using WebView to play YouTube videos would require extensive testing and debugging on different Android OS versions due to the difference in functionality and bugs between Android 2.x and 4.x.

A less bug-prone approach that gives you more control is to use YouTube Android Player API to embed a YouTube video into your own app, they have sample app so it shouldn't be too difficult if you follow their steps.