[ARCHIVED] YouTube App Search Results Aren't As Good As Regular YouTube

[HughBonar]

I've noticed that when I search on a topic with the YouTube app in Canvas I get different results than when I just search on YouTube, and they often aren't as "good" or accurate. In fact, I've gone so far as to copy the exact title of a video I want on YouTube, paste the title directly into the YouTube Canvas app, and it still can't find the video! 

Just wondering what this is about. 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello there, @HughBonar ...

I'm not sure I can answer your question about why search results might be different.  However, I like to harvest the embed code directly from YouTube for any video I would add to a course page in Canvas.  The reason for this is that when I use the YouTube App (LTI), it still adds some black bars at the top and bottom of the video even though the video is designed for wide-screen (16:9 ratio).  For me, this is annoying, and I think it just looks better without the extra, unused black bars.  It's just taking up more screen real estate by having those black bars there.  Here is an example (before I hit the "Play" button) of what a video looks like using the YouTube app (top image) vs using the embed code directly from YouTube (bottom image).

Here is what the videos look like after I hit play (notice the black bars at the above/below the video in the top video):

This Guide, How do I embed media from an external source in th... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com), provides a great example of how you can use YouTube embed code using the RCE (Rich Content Editor).

I hope this will be of some help to you.  Let Community members know if you have any other questions about this...thanks!

[ColtonSwapp]

Hello @HughBonar 

I am not sure why the search results would be different when you search for it using the LTI instead of the searching directly from youtube. I was not able to find any real documentation on why it would be resulting differently when searching directly from the LTI instead of through Youtube's direct instance. It might be best to have canvas support look into this to see if it is related to a known issue with the Youtube LTI. 

Hopefully this helps! 

-Colton

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

I have been diving into the Youtube LTI @HughBonar .  There is a way to find a video in the LTI that you already found in Youtube.  Don't search on the title, instead grab the video ID from the URL.  That finds the exact video.  For example, this video URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofNzI5b03KA can be found in the LTI by searching for ofNzI5b03KA.  URLS can look different, but they always have an ID number.

About the black bars, I found some videos have them using the LTI, and some don't. The above video does.  The optimum resolution for the one with black bars is 640x360 (that info is available in Youtube), but the LTI puts the medium size iframe at 640x480, too tall for the video, so it puts bars top and bottom.  I can change the height of the video's iframe and it fixes it, but wish it were automatic.  Copying the embed code from Youtube does give you the correct size.

Who wrote the youtube LTI?  I wonder if they could make the iframe and video size match the optimum resolution of the video.

[choppingm]

Not only are the results different -- they are much, much worse. I really do not understand why specific videos cannot be located if the exact title (with or without quotation marks) and (optionally) channel name are provided. This is crazy. I guess it's back to pasting the embed code into the HTML editor 🙂