Create a custom desktop YouTube player

Question

I want to create an application capable to play YouTube video's audios and also save the downloaded content in a local cache, therefore when the user decides to resume or play the video again, then it doesn't have to download part of video again but only download the remaining part (User can decide what to do with the cache then, and how to organize it).

It is also very convenient for mobiles (it is my main focus) but I'd like to create a desktop one too for experimental purposes.

So, my question itself is, does YouTube provide any API for this? I mean, in order to cache the download content I need that my application download the content and not any embed player (also remember that it is a native application). I have a third-party application in my Android system that plays YouTube videos, so I think it's possible unless that the developers use some sort of hack, again this is what I don't know.

Don't confuse with the web gdata info API and the embed API, this is not what I want, what I want is to handle the video transfer.

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no official API for that. However, you could use libquvi to look up the URLs of the real video data, or you could have a look at how they do it and reimplement it yourself (see here).