This is beta 0.5.2 of Yougle, the community video browser for your Media Center.

It can be used to watch, browse and search for videos on Google Video and YouTube. And yes, you can search BOTH sites at once, and your list of favourites can contain videos from both sites.

 

Fixes from previous version

   * Includes an About and Version screen

   * Server Timeout Extended - the time until the web-server automatically closes down has been dramatically increased to allow you to watch long YouTube movies.

 

For those who used the previous program, YouTubeMCE, I've also made the following improvements:

   * Corrected the error message when no search results found - should stop people being mislead into thinking there are connection/firewall issues

   * Included a message from the Push-A-Button website to help when site format changes break YouTube or Google Video compatibility.

   * Internet Update has been enabled by default

   * Video placement on widescreen televisions has been improved

 

The product can be downloaded from http://www.push-a-button.com.au/products/mce/Yougle.php

Known Bugs:

   * The timeout is too short - if you start browsing, but leave it alone for too long (or watch videos that are longer than usual) you will get some minor errors. I'll patch this up with a small update this afternoon.

Version 0.5.1 Released

Fixes from previous version

   * Includes an About and Version screen

   * Server Timeout Extended - the time until the web-server automatically closes down has been dramatically increased to allow you to watch long YouTube movies.

Dowloaded , watch bunch of MV from Google Video . It's great , thanks for the plug-in.
Here is the problem , after using for a while I cannot continue search , error" page error , cannot display ...ect " I get out of Yougle and came back in everything working again.

That was the problem I fixed with last nights update. Unfortunately, that particular change (since it's a registry file setting) can't be distributed through the automatic Yougle Internet Update and has to be done with an installer, or by hand.

 So you have two options.

     a) Download Yougle 0.5.1 and install it

            or if you are worried about bandwidth...

     b) If trust yourself enough to play in your Windows registry, start regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Push-A-Button\BounceParse\Yougle and add a new DWORD value called 'Timeout' and set it to a number like '600'.

   In 0.5.0, not viewing a new movie or navigating through the plugin for 60 seconds or more would shut down the web-server that runs in the background. Of course for YouTube or Google Video movies, this is just stupid. The change gives you MUCH more time to watch a movie.

   Good to know it works for you and you are enjoying it - just download the new one, and we should be able to take care of your current problem.

   Thanks for the feedback! If anyone else is using it, please feel free to leave comments - I like to know people are downloading and using the program!

New version released - version 0.5.2 

   All people who currently have an installed copy will get these changes via the Automatic Update.

 

UPDATES INCLUDE

   * Google Video site changes as of 19/08/06 (brings Google Video compatibility back to the product)

   * The source of the video (eg. YouTube or Google Video) appears when you are searching both providers

   * A bad link to the 'Search' page of the Choose a Provider screen has been repaired

   * When you play a video and go back to the menu, that video is selected rather than the 'Next' button, to make it easier to move through a selection of videos. This is thanks to a review by Aaron Stebner of YouTubeMCE - http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/07/30/683703.aspx

First off, thanks for this great program!

At first I was having problems viewing content but was able to fix it by following advice from the YouTube thread. As a Firefox user IE just wasn't setup to view content correctly. After reinstalling Flash in IE and "Allowing" some security warnings about ActiveX youtube and the Yougle add-on both worked perfectly.

Any chance that there will be an "auto full screen" option in a later version? I, personally, always watch videos in full screen and it would be nice if it would just do full screen as soon as it was picked from the list.

Another nice feature would be some sort of indicator or option relating to where abouts you are in the list of each page. As YouTube, Top Rated, Page 1 has more content than can fit on a single screen, the add-on scrolls through that list and then wraps back around to the top. It would be nice to know when you've returned to the top somehow, or have the option to disable wrap around.

I'm sure everyone has a few things they'd love to see, including yourself, but if you get a chance to implement any of these I'd appreciate it.

Great work and thanks again!

Yeah, I've been thinking about an 'Auto Fullscreen' option myself, actually. It's something that's been in the back of my mind, I may give it a go for the next version.

There actually IS a control already in place that tells you where you are in the list, it should appear in the lower-right hand corner of the screen (eg. showing 20/20). However, I have had issues with the positioning of this control in some screen modes. You don't happen to know what resolution you are running in, do you? I know it appears on a 4:3 display, but I don't have a widescreen here for testing.

I love the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWS8GNQX_Ys - it's excellent. And it feels odd to be using the Yougle plugin to view a video of Yougle in use ;)

Cosmetic fix coming in the next day or so - making sure that your background images appear (there is SUPPOSED to be a pretty background image there, but for any user who has Yougle but not YouTubeMCE, the background image will be missing)

Off topic:

You don't need a widescreen to test your app in widescreen just use the following

C:\windows\eHome\ehshell.exe /widescreen

Copy and paste this in a text file and save it as whatever.bat.

Now you can double click this file and mediacenter will start in widescreen mode

Maurice

 

Awesome App!! 

One suggestion (not sure if I have seen this suggsted to you or not), but would it be possible to add another source?  Break-dot-com (used to be BigBoys) has some great vids as well!

Many Thx!!

I'm looking into new sources now. Next on the list you'll find MySpace, and perhaps Grabber. I'll look into this one.

If you DO find a community video site (I'd love to use JibJab, but it's site structure is designed to be unfriendly to folks like me), please list it and I'll see about getting it up and running.

Also, if you know any PHP and would like to try writing your OWN video source, please feel free to tinker with the Yougle code. If you do make a working source, I can make it part of the full installation - and add you to the credits, of course.

By the way, Yahoo Video is up and running, apart from the fact that you need to CLICK videos in order to play them, which is kinda silly - particularly for those who use a remote control. Until I figure this one out, I'm unable to release the Yahoo Video component of Yougle.

New version of Yougle out soon, with Grouper videos. For a preview (and to report any bugs before you go to the effort of downloading this darn thing), check out the links below.

This is a SHARED copy of Yougle. This means that any Favourites you add will be shared, and other people using the site will cause YOU to also move around the site. Please use this sparingly, as my bandwidth is limited.

Changes:

   * Added Grouper Compatibility

   * More 'Media Center Like' behaviours and appearance, including greying of control groups.

   * Repositioned and rescaled the Flash window in non-fullscreen playback to center it properly in unusual resolutions and widescreen TV's.

   * Adding a favourite or renaming a video now refreshes the movie properly when pressing 'Back'

   * Minor issues resolved when searching all video sources

   * New text input contols now support non-alpha keys and punctuation, as well as being more attractive graphically.

   * Made changes to improve performance, particularly in searches.

   * Removed message that could appear when pressing 'Back' in fullscreen mode.

   * 'Back' no longer possible when you delete a video from Favourites

http://www.push-a-button.com.au/mce/yougle.html

http://www.push-a-button.com.au/mce/yougle.mcl

is there anyway to be able to login to youtube and just use the favorite settings for the account? that would seem more efficient than having to slowly search through media center, and adding another whole lot of favorites.

That's a 'Maybe'. The trouble is that the Yougle favourites list has favourites from Google Video, Grouper and YouTube, not JUST YouTube. So we can't store them all in your YouTube account.

But I'll take a look at the idea of an 'Import' function, to let you enter your username and password once so it can grab your YouTube favourites.

I've just tried this in my xbox 360 and it runs OK but there is no way to search using the MCE remote.  I managed to get some results from a previous search I have made on the PC but when playing the videos, they are very jerky.  Is 360 support planned for this project at all?