Hiccup with embedded YouTube player thingy

August 18, 2008 9:17 AM

"Video player" link to UK YouTube doesn't work.

However, the regular link that opens up a YouTube tab works just fine. I tried this with another YouTube link (not UK YouTube though) and no problem.

Some facts:
I am in the US&A.
Mac OS 10.5.3
FF 3.0.1

posted by Mister_A to Bugs at 9:17 AM (19 comments total)

It works, it's just that the owner of that particular video has "Embedding disabled by request". So the video won't come up in windows like the MeFi video player. If we wanted to get fancy we could probably index every YouTube link that crosses MeFi, hit the Youtube API to see if it's embeddable, and not show the player link for those videos. But until we do that, the player will be hit and miss due to non-embeddable videos.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:22 AM on August 18, 2008

Embedding is disabled on that video, so it won't play on other sites (like MetaFilter). You can see that embedding is disabled on the upper right info box next to the video.

We have no way to knowing ahead of time if someone set something to disable embedding, so you will find the occasional error message.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:22 AM on August 18, 2008

Oh cool, thanks guys. I had a feeling that there was a simple explanation like that.
posted by Mister_A at 9:35 AM on August 18, 2008

Also: the Masons.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:53 AM on August 18, 2008

Ha! I knew it. I am pretty sure they rigged the school board election in Collingswood, and now this? WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
posted by Mister_A at 9:59 AM on August 18, 2008

And: the Friars.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:26 AM on August 18, 2008

If we wanted to get fancy we could probably index every YouTube link that crosses MeFi, hit the Youtube API to see if it's embeddable, and not show the player link for those videos.

* Sits down, pulls out newspaper and waits*
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:53 AM on August 18, 2008

Could some manually added mark-up added after the fact do the job? It'd be a hassle, but would save a lot of "youtube link broken!" comments.
posted by Artw at 11:19 AM on August 18, 2008

Remember the good old days when You Tube did not exist? Remember the acronym SLNP? (Single Link to No Place)
posted by Cranberry at 11:46 AM on August 18, 2008

Alternatively an automatic redirect to Barrickroll...
posted by Artw at 11:51 AM on August 18, 2008

couldn't someone write some fancy script to download the YouTube video and upload it to some sort of geographically-distributed mirroring service, replace the links in the post to point to the new copy, and never have to worry about embedding or video take-downs ever again?

I'm just sayin'...
posted by blue_beetle at 12:15 PM on August 18, 2008

blue_beetle: "couldn't someone write some fancy script to download the YouTube video and upload it to some sort of geographically-distributed mirroring service, replace the links in the post to point to the new copy, and never have to worry about embedding or video take-downs ever again?"

Uh, er..
Isn't that what YouTube is?
posted by Plutor at 12:32 PM on August 18, 2008

Luckily this UK Youtube vid has no restrictions - as far as I understand the author would like it to be viewed in any context and under any circumstances.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:45 PM on August 18, 2008

I've noticed this before (probably because 90% of my post involve a youtube link, I MFing own that tag! Own it!) ... anyway a bit back I nearly stuck up a post here (but was too lazy) wondering if, where the youtube don't allow embedding, there's anyway of doing a link that doesn't have the auto-youtube-playing-in-a-popup-thing and is just an ordinary link, or someone somewhere doing some code-wrangling to allow it?
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:46 PM on August 18, 2008

fearfulsymmetry, it's possible, but it would be a bit of a project. We'd need to set up a table here that stores every YouTube link posted to MeFi as a separate record. Then we'd use the YouTube API to see if a particular link is embeddable, and set a flag for each entry in the link table. Then as we write out a page here, we'd do a quick lookup in the YouTube link table to see if a particular link is embeddable.

It would still be a little sketchy because someone could change their video to non-embeddable after we've set our local embeddable flag. So we could periodically ping the YouTube API to double-check our flag, but at this point I'm not sure the effort required is worth fending off a few "video is no longer available" messages.

Someone could write a Greasemonkey script to check on the fly with every page load. But that approach wouldn't scale on our end.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:04 PM on August 18, 2008

Would something like an extra attribute in the link not work, as a way of doing it without all the tables etc...?
posted by Artw at 5:30 PM on August 18, 2008

Not that I know of, Artw. But if there's something simple we can do to make it happen I'd be all for it.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:50 PM on August 18, 2008

Also: the Masons.

I'm still dealing with the rainbow conspiracy. Don't dump too much on me at once, I can't take it.
posted by middleclasstool at 8:36 PM on August 18, 2008

I suppose you could just put an 'youtube not embedded' or similar warning in the post, but it's a bit clunky
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:01 AM on August 19, 2008