In a new post to his site Alex Bilbie looks at a good approach to simplifying the OAuth 2 authorization flow for a device and some of the simple PHP that can power it.

When signing into apps and services on devices such as a Playstation or an Apple TV it can be immensely frustrating experience. Generally you will ordeal something similar to one of the following scenarios: The utterly terrible experience whereby you don’t have anything other than an onscreen keyboard [or] A slightly less terrible experience whereby you can pair a bluetooth keyboard to enter your username and that crazy long password.

[...] There are some apps however - such as Youtube for Apple TV - that have a much better end user experience.

He talks more about this better experience involving a simple code presented to the user, a special URL to link the device and the typical OAuth-ish authorization page to link the request to your account. He then explains how it would work with a PHP backend: making the request to the auth server, returning a message with the codes and URL to pass along and the "device code" it responds with. He also includes a few examples of error responses for polling too quickly, pending authorization and a denied request. This is all based on the (currently in draft) OAuth 2.0 Device Flow Grant currently in the works.