Hey so I have a website which has video's gathered from places around the web, primarily youtube but a few other's as well. Now I am wondering if there is some way to check link's to make sure they are still available through a unix shell. (My idea is to run a cron to check videos are still available and if not delete them.) I am aware i could use user to do this but it always bothered me and was wondering if there is somehow to check the playback of a flash video though the terminal . Any insight into this would be awesome as I haven't found much on the web. Also note ideally the tech. will work on all video type's including html5.

update So it's occured to me that through the you tube api, I could check the status of the video's coming from youtube (which is a start). But I would love to know if there's something else that is not player specific but rather just calls the video to play similar to how a user would.