Youtube.com/v/fo_acb123 -- How do they get this redirect to work?

Hey everyone,

I’m trying to figure out a better way to provide my site’s embeddable snippets. When I was researching YouTube’s method, I noticed that they don’t link to an actual .swf file and pass params in, but rather simply link to a directory. Here’s an example:


<object width="425" height="355">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fo_QVq2lGMs"></param>
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
    <embed 
        src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fo_QVq2lGMs" 
        type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
        wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355">
    </embed>
</object>

The key part is the http://www.youtube.com/v/fo_QVq2lGMs.

I would be interested in some feedback as to how one would return this data. Is it just a redirect script going on (via the language of your choice)? So it does some sort of redirect to http://www.youtube.com/v/player.swf?config=QVq2lGMs ?

If anyone has any experience, I’d love to hear how you tackled it! Thanks.