What happened to YouTube playlist embed codes?!

I’m writing this post to document something that’s been frustrating me all morning.

YouTube is in the process of rolling out an update to their user interface in which the player takes centre stage and many other elements can be dynamically navigated without interrupting existing videos, and forcing a page refresh.  It looks pretty schmick in some respects, but I’ve notice certain elements have been seriously affected.

Case in point is locating the embed code for playlists. Via George Siemen’s blog I discovered a collection of really great interviews with a dozen educators who attended this year’s ED-MEDIA conference in Hawaii.  I’ve yet to watch them all, but of the ones I have seen they’ve all been insightful and well worth sharing.  So I tried to locate the embed code for the playlist.

Unfortunately this information is not displayed when viewing the playlist on the default page, and clicking on Playlists in the header simply restructures the clips into a series of thumbnails, again without revealing the elusive embed code snippet.  I was growing quite miffed about it until I finally discovered a workaround.

Note, NO CODE SNIPPET!

Workaround

Near as I can tell, you no longer have direct access to the unique pages for playlists from the user’s channel (though this information is available to the accountholder in the My Account area – just select a playlist and then click edit playlist info from the middle of the screen). Why on Earth YouTube has decided to do this is beyond me – but I hope they fix it.

No, it appears that what is now required is a general search.  However having tried to search for the playlist title alone, I’ve discovered you are innundated by irrelevant material.

The best way to do it seems to be to go to the Playlist search area and search for the playlist title followed by the username of the channel owner.  For example “learning with technology gregaloha.”  The search results tend to display the playlist you’re after right at the top of the list.

Clicking on the title of the playlist then loads the unique page which contains the embed code snippet right at the top.

Note WE HAVE EMBED CODE SNIPPET! Yaaaay!

User Feedback for YouTube

As a fairly loyal user of the YouTube service may I humbly offer the following feedback: Fix this nonsense! Embedding of playlists may or may not be particularly common, but one thing is clear – when you introduce an “improvement” or new feature it shouldn’t come at the expense of existing features, especially embedded media.  The current system is ridiculously complex and warrants some serious reconsideration.

The End Result

At long last after all that stuffing around, I can finally give you this: