It is possible to play/stop a youtube video using external software?

Question

It is possible to play/stop a youtube video(inside a web browser like FireFox), using external software(C#)?

Answer 1

I would assume this is not allowed by the YouTube Terms of Service, but I'm not sure. In any case, if this is more of a pet project or proof of concept here are some thoughts:

• I doubt there are any existing libraries, etc... that can do this b/c of the TOS point.
• You could probably build this on your own as so:
  • Load a page in a WebBrowser form control.
  • Once the page has loaded (DocumentCompleted event), search the DOM (browser.Document) for the video player element. You would probably look for a Flash element or some typically CSS class/id that YouTube always uses.
  • Get the screen position of that element. Not sure how to do this, maybe you can figure it out?
  • Simulate a mouse click (http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=321029) on the video player.

Once you have found the screen position, you only need to do the mouse click subsequent times. I like the above approach because you can more easily port it to other video sites if you need to - rather than relying on APIs.

I'm also curious why you want to do this. Could you let us in on your thoughts?