This change will become effective on or after 15 November 2020. After that time, calls to the cuePlaylist or loadPlaylist functions that set the listType property to search will generate a 4xx response code, such as 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone). This change also affects the list property for those functions as that property no longer supports the ability to specify a search query.

As an alternative, you can use the YouTube Data API's search.list method to retrieve search results and then load selected videos in the player.

The changes explained in the following list have been in effect for more than one year. This update merely aligns the documentation with current functionality:

• The getPlaybackQuality, setPlaybackQuality, and getAvailableQualityLevels functions are no longer supported. In particular, calls to setPlaybackQuality will be no-op functions, meaning they will not actually have any impact on the viewer's playback experience.
• The queueing functions for videos and playlists -- cueVideoById, loadVideoById, etc. -- no longer support the suggestedQuality argument. Similarly, if you call those functions using object syntax, the suggestedQuality field is no longer supported. If suggestedQuality is specified, it will be ignored when the request is handled. It will not generate any warnings or errors.
• The onPlaybackQualityChange event is still supported and might signal a change in the viewer's playback environment. See the Help Center article referenced earlier for more information about factors that affect playback conditions or that might cause the event to fire.

• The getSphericalProperties function retrieves the current orientation for the video playback. The orientation includes the following data:
  • yaw - represents the horizontal angle of the view in degrees, which reflects the extent to which the user turns the view to face further left or right
  • pitch - represents the vertical angle of the view in degrees, which reflects the extent to which the user adjusts the view to look up or down
  • roll - represents the rotational angle (clockwise or counterclockwise) of the view in degrees.
  • fov - represents the field-of-view of the view in degrees, which reflects the extent to which the user zooms in or out on the video.
• The setSphericalProperties function modifies the view to match the submitted property values. In addition to the orientation values described earlier, this function supports a Boolean field that indicates whether the IFrame embed should respond to DeviceOrientationEvents on supported mobile devices.

This example demonstrates and lets you test these new features.

• Documentation for the YouTube Flash Player API and YouTube JavaScript Player API has been removed and redirected to this document. The deprecation announcement for the Flash and JavaScript players was made on January 27, 2015. If you haven't done so already, migrate your applications to use IFrame embeds and the IFrame Player API.

• The newly published YouTube API Services Terms of Service ("the Updated Terms"), discussed in detail on the YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog, provides a rich set of updates to the current Terms of Service. In addition to the Updated Terms, which will go into effect as of February 10, 2017, this update includes several supporting documents to help explain the policies that developers must follow.

  The full set of new documents is described in the revision history for the Updated Terms. In addition, future changes to the Updated Terms or to those supporting documents will also be explained in that revision history. You can subscribe to an RSS feed listing changes in that revision history from a link in that document.

• The documentation has been corrected to note that the onApiChange method provides access to the captions module and not the cc module.

• The new removeEventListener function lets you remove a listener for a specified event.

• The Requirements section has been updated to note that embedded players must have a viewport that is at least 200px by 200px. If a player displays controls, it must be large enough to fully display the controls without shrinking the viewport below the minimum size. We recommend 16:9 players be at least 480 pixels wide and 270 pixels tall.

• The Overview now includes a video of a 2011 Google I/O presentation that discusses the iframe player.

• The Queueing functions section has been updated to explain that you can use either argument syntax or object syntax to call all of those functions. Note that the API may support additional functionality in object syntax that the argument syntax does not support.

  In addition, the descriptions and examples for each of the video queueing functions have been updated to reflect the newly added support for object syntax. (The API's playlist queueing functions already supported object syntax.)

• When called using object syntax, each of the video queueing functions supports an endSeconds property, which accepts a float/integer and specifies the time when the video should stop playing when playVideo() is called.

• The getVideoStartBytes method has been deprecated. The method now always returns a value of 0.

• The example in the Loading a video player section that demonstrates how to manually create the <iframe> tag has been updated to include a closing </iframe> tag since the onYouTubeIframeAPIReady function is only called if the closing </iframe> element is present.

• The Operations section has been expanded to list all of the supported API functions rather than linking to the JavaScript Player API Reference for that list.

• The API supports several new functions and one new event that can be used to control the video playback speed:

  • Functions

    • getAvailablePlaybackRates – Retrieve the supported playback rates for the cued or playing video. Note that variable playback rates are only supported in the HTML5 player.
    • getPlaybackRate – Retrieve the playback rate for the cued or playing video.
    • setPlaybackRate – Set the playback rate for the cued or playing video.

  • Events

    • onPlaybackRateChange – This event fires when the video's playback rate changes.

• The new getVideoLoadedFraction method replaces the now-deprecated getVideoBytesLoaded and getVideoBytesTotal methods. The new method returns the percentage of the video that the player shows as buffered.

• The onError event may now return an error code of 5, which indicates that the requested content cannot be played in an HTML5 player or another error related to the HTML5 player has occurred.

• The Requirements section has been updated to indicate that any web page using the IFrame API must also implement the onYouTubeIframeAPIReady function. Previously, the section indicated that the required function was named onYouTubePlayerAPIReady. Code samples throughout the document have also been updated to use the new name.

  Note: To ensure that this change does not break existing implementations, both names will work. If, for some reason, your page has an onYouTubeIframeAPIReady function and an onYouTubePlayerAPIReady function, both functions will be called, and the onYouTubeIframeAPIReady function will be called first.

• The code sample in the Getting started section has been updated to reflect that the URL for the IFrame Player API code has changed to http://www.youtube.com/iframe_api. To ensure that this change does not affect existing implementations, the old URL (http://www.youtube.com/player_api) will continue to work.

• The Operations section now explains that the API supports the setSize() and destroy() methods. The setSize() method sets the size in pixels of the <iframe> that contains the player and the destroy() method removes the <iframe>.

• We have removed the experimental status from the IFrame Player API.

• The Loading a video player section has been updated to point out that when inserting the <iframe> element that will contain the YouTube player, the IFrame API replaces the element specified in the constructor for the YouTube player. This documentation change does not reflect a change in the API and is intended solely to clarify existing behavior.

  In addition, that section now notes that the insertion of the <iframe> element could affect the layout of your page if the element being replaced has a different display style than the inserted <iframe> element. By default, an <iframe> displays as an inline-block element.

• The Operations section has been updated to explain that the IFrame API supports a new method, getIframe(), which returns the DOM node for the IFrame embed.

• The Requirements section has been updated to note the minimum player size.