How to launch the official youtube app from your app

Since this morning, ‘metro tube’ developers enable third-party developers to use their app to play youtube video instead of embed a custom youtube player in their applications.

http://lazywormapps.com/metrotube-URI-schema.html

This is cool, but personally, I won’t do that, cause I trust only the official player for several reasons:

It’s supported by Microsoft, more stable and less risky, ‘Metro tube’ using a hack to retrieve Urls of the mp4 video, it happened several times in the past that the application no longer works for days, a good way to have negative comments in your own application.

There is a risk that the application be removed by Youtube for non-compliance with the youtube TOS

Metro tube is a paid application, I do not want to impose this on my users.

Other apps can use the same protocol extension and can be crappy

The question now is:

How to launch the official player?

For this, you only need to use the protocol extension of the official application: vnd.youtube.

So create a launcher et use the youtube video id as a parameter.

For example, the video id of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0 is ‘9bZkp7q19f0’ :

Windows.System.Launcher.LaunchUriAsync( new System.Uri("vnd.youtube:9bZkp7q19f0") );