Youtube player for multiple videos from various accounts

I have a page that has many videos on it and the page has become so slow it is unusable. These are all Youtube videos and I changed to the new iFrame tags hoping that would help the loading. I need a solution to make this page more useable.

I would be happy if I could just pull a frame from the开发者_C百科 video and display that, when clicked it would load the video. Or I would be happy with a multi-video player. The custom play from Youtube will not work because the videos I am serving are not all from my account and as I understand the custom player you reference a group from your account. I have also considered using AJAX to load the iframe, which would be okay too if I could figure out how to get a thumbnail of the video to show as a link.

Ideas and suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

YouTube API is made up of 2 different sets - one for the player and one for the data.

You can start here ... http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html ... then click on "Data API" link and after looking over that page, click on the "Reference Guide" link.

In essence, the gData API will allow you to get videos in numerous ways (feeds, channels, tops, etc) in chunks of up to 100 videos at a time, using a startIndex (or whatever it may be called) option for paging. What you get is an XML document with parts or everything that YT has about a video, including not one but several different thumbnail images.

HTH helps you and/or another Web 0.2 Fellow (like me)