jQuery YouTube Player is a powerful plugin that allows you to handle all the most common aspects related to YouTube's videos. In fact, with this plugin you can create video galleries, turn plain YouTube's textual links into working embedded videos and much more. The latter aspect is very important for accessibility reasons: by using a simple textual link in your markup you make sure that a fallback mechanism will be always available even when JavaScript is not supported or disabled. Further, with this plugin you can also extract metadata from YouTube, as shown below.
We are all in debt with the author of this plugin for his great work that surely will spare us a lot of time in the future. More info on github.