Flex Youtube Grabber

A have been checking out a recent application called Scrapblog and looking under the hood at how the put the application together. I know they use XML to markup the coordinates and properties of media elements on the page.  What surprised me was that they take a Bitmap image of each slide and save that as a single JPEG file when you publish your Scrapblog.   I had just assumed they copy images from Flickr to the server and referenced those images in the published content.   I even thought they might dynamically link the images from Flickr.  I did notice though, that Scrapblog links to Youtube videos dynamically. 

They are obviously not using the Youtube API because Youtube blew that up by changing making a security policy change to the crossdomain.xml file needed to pull videos into Flex.   So I did a little investigation.  I found a site, in French, that had a Flash 8 application to basically screen scrape and decode the URL to Youtube videos.   I migrated this over to Flex and created a small demo application.  

I don’t think this is the most practical approach to grabbing Youtube videos and I am not entirely sure this is the only method, I wanted to put the application out there for comments and suggestions.   Another suggested solution was to use the BrightCove API.  Here is my first attempt at the grabber using screen scraping:

Youtube Grabber (right-click to see source)

Update:

I found an excellent blog post similar to mine, although posted sooner and works better. Check out YouTube FLV URL post by Abdul. This one works great for getting the URL to Youtube videos.  Here is a link to a new updated example file and source:

Youtube Grabber 2 (right-click to see source)