Displaying Random YouTube Video with PHP

HTML, sure...CSS, yup...PHP, not so much.

Since I don't put any energy into learning PHP, I like finding snippets of code that I can easily tweak and post to a website. Below is a PHP script which will randomly choose a YouTube video (from a list of videos you place in a file) and display it on a webpage.

Why would you want to do that? If you have a website within a certain niche, music for example, you could create a list of your favorite music videos or live songs and have one randomly chosen to be displayed on the homepage of your website. This gives users a new experience (if your list is big enough) every time.

Here's how to do it.

1) First, create a txt file which you'll place your videos in, in this example I name it videos.txt.

2) Navigate to a YouTube video. Let's say you want to share with your visitors that there are alien bases on the far side of the moon, and so you want this video to come up periodically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6QNzH4x1rY

Grab the string of text from the URL after "v=", in the above case "R6QNzH4x1rY" and place it in the videos.txt file. Each of these strings should be placed on a new line.

3) Upload your file to your web server.

4) Where you want the video to display on your page, place the below code. Remember to change the file location to match where you placed your txt.

<?php

$file = '/CHANGE-ME/videos.txt';

$data = file($file);
$line = trim($data[array_rand($data)]);

echo <<<YT
<object width="178" height="135">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/$line"></param>
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/$line" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="178" height="135"></embed>
</object>
YT;

?>

In the above example you can change the size of the YouTube video my simply adjusting the width and height variables. You'll want it to work nicely with your site's design, so do adjust.