Previously I had been getting a YouTube user/channel’s human readable name using the $t field within the entry and title fields from an API call like the following:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/_6w3OSoTacXjd42ELqLbGQ?v=2&alt=json
The documentation explains that this title tag should contain:
a human-readable title for a feed or an entry in a feed
https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/reference#youtube_data_api_tag_title
This used to be the case, but now the title contains the username of the channel/user instead of its human readable name. In the API call eaxmple above the title tag contains DBZ3333 but the actual human readable name is Kanal von DBZ3333 and this doesn’t appear anywhere in the API response.
I cannot find any announcements or any documenation mentioning this change, is this a bug in the YouTube API?
Is there now any way of getting a user/channel’s human readable name using the YouTube API?
EDIT: Okay, unfortunately this is something that can’t easily be reverted. I’m told that in the Data API v3 there will be an additional field for display name in addition to the one for channel title (in the coming weeks), but the v2 behavior needs to stay as-is.
This was an inadvertent change in behavior, and the engineering team has just written a fix for it. It should be deployed into production in around a week.