Posting an embedded video link using the Facebook Graph API

facebook youtube facebook-graph-api embed vimeo
Ryan McGeary picture Ryan McGeary · Mar 8, 2011 · Viewed 53.2k times · Source

When manually attaching a video link (from YouTube, Vimeo, etc) to a post using the Facebook web interface, Facebook automatically recognizes the link as a video, and allows the resulting status message to play the video inline. The video is displayed as an embedded player in the Wall or News feed.

Here's an example of what an embedded video looks like after posting manually.

Embedded Video

When posting a link using the Graph API, the video is not embedded. 

curl -F 'access_token=...' \
     -F 'message=Link to YouTube' \
     -F 'link=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aICB2mUu2k' \
     https://graph.facebook.com/me/feed

Not-Embedded Video

I suspect the answer is related to the source argument, but I'm not sure what the URL should be there. Specifying the same URL just leads to a post with no thumbnail image whatsoever.

source: A URL to a Flash movie or video file to be embedded within the post. read_stream.

How can the same embedded behavior be accomplished by using the Graph API alone?

Answer

Anomie picture Anomie · Mar 15, 2011

It appears that you have to extract the URLs of the actual swf in the page and the thumbnail image yourself. For example, this seems to work:

curl -F 'access_token=...' \
     -F 'message=Link to YouTube' \
     -F 'link=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aICB2mUu2k' \
     -F 'source=http://www.youtube.com/v/3aICB2mUu2k' \
     -F 'picture=http://img.youtube.com/vi/3aICB2mUu2k/0.jpg' \
     https://graph.facebook.com/me/feed

It appears that you can generate a valid source and picture from the page URL. The URL looks like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<code>; take the code (3aICB2mUu2k here) and insert it into the URLs http://www.youtube.com/e/<code> for the source and and http://img.youtube.com/vi/<code>/0.jpg for the picture.

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