What is the YouTube's PlayerState during pre-roll ad?

3
votes

The Flash YouTube API getPlayerState() method has 6 possible values:

  • -1 (unstarted)
  • 0 (ended)
  • 1 (playing)
  • 2 (paused)
  • 3 (buffering)
  • 5 (video cued).

The manual reads:

When the player first loads a video, it will broadcast an unstarted (-1) event. When a video is cued and ready to play, the player will broadcast a video cued (5) event. In your code, you can specify the integer values or you can use one of the following namespaced variables.

Consider this:

  1. The player is CUED waiting for user interaction.
  2. User clicks play
  3. Pre-roll video ad starts to play

What state is the player in during the pre-roll ad? How do I know an ad is being played?

1
flashyoutube-api
Can't you just make a dev player that throws player info every second or something so you can watch the player state in realtime as you play with it? – zebediah49
That will be my second action. You know, they have this button there that reads "Get Help". I clicked it and it landed me here. What a surprise! :) – daniel.sedlacek

1 Answers

9
votes

I did the legwork for you at https://developers.google.com/youtube/youtube_player_demo

Cuing a video with a preroll and then clicking Play leads to:

  1. onStateChange event: Player state changed to: "-1" (undefined)
  2. cueVideoById(cggNqDAtJYU, parseInt(0), default);
  3. onStateChange event: Player state changed to: "5" (video cued)
  4. onStateChange event: Player state changed to: "2" (paused)

So the video's state is PAUSED (2) while the ad is playing. Additionally, calls to playVideo() or pauseVideo() will be no-ops during a preroll.