okay I sort of got it working, thanks to all yall's help...
it's finally feeding the variable into the attribute properly, i've confirmed that, however now I have another problem which is probaly outside the scope of php/html etc
I get the frame, and inside of it it looks like this:
------------------------------------------------
Firefox Can’t Open This Page
To protect your security, www.youtube.com
will not allow Firefox to display the page if
another site has embedded it. To see this page,
you need to open it in a new window.
Learn more…
-----------------------------------------
when I click on that frame, it will load in a new window on the youtube site, but it won't embed. They must have changed something recently because I used to be able to embed videos like that. I even tried again without the variable, no php, just plain text in the src attribute and it gives the same error... some youtube permissions problem.
Well at least the problem I was concerned about has been solved. Thanks again for all your help. I'm pretty good with C# C++ But PHP has been kind of tricky for me so far. Thanks!