Comments for oEmbed: An Open Format for Embedding Media

oEmbed: An Open Format for Embedding Media

2008-05-09T17:29:17Z

oEmbed is a newly released spec from Cal Henderson (of Flickr), Mike Malone and Leah Culver (of Pownce), and Richard Crowley (of OpenDNS) that allows web sites to quickly and easily embed media when a user posts a link directly to that resource. oEmbed is an open format which standardizes the process of embedding photos, videos, links, or other media and circumvents the media provider's API (or the need for screen scraping if they don't offer one). It works by turning a link to, say, a photo or video into XML or JSON that tells the user how to embed that media.

]]> "oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly," says the authors on the oEmbed web page.

As an example http://flickr.com/services/oembed?url=http://flickr.com/photos/bees/2362225867/ returns:

<oembed>
	<version>1.0</version>
	<type>photo</type>
	<title>Bacon Lollys</title>
	<author_name>bees</author_name>
	<author_url>http://www.flickr.com/photos/bees/</author_url>
	<cache_age>3600</cache_age>
	<provider_name>Flickr</provider_name>
	<provider_url>http://www.flickr.com/</provider_url>
	<width>500</width>
	<height>375</height>
	<url>
		http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3040/2362225867_4a87ab8baf.jpg
	</url>
</oembed>

Early adopters of the oEmbed spec are Flickr, Viddler, Pownce, Qik, and Revision3. Viddler has created a form to test the web service, so you can see it in action.

Essentially, oEmbed makes it easier to access photos and videos with a simple URL. Standardizing how things are embedded means that, for example, a social network could allow users to simply embed media from oEmbed enabled sites just by entering a URL to a photo or video -- and the "customer" site wouldn't need to deal with multiple APIs from each provider.

Comment from Guillaume on 2008-05-09

2008-05-09T21:11:55Z

Excellent idea :)

For some reason Pownce seems to parse viddler coorectly but not Flickr...

Comment from Douglas Karr on 2008-05-09

2008-05-10T02:12:01Z

Interesting concept. I guess one of the advantages is indexing media and not having to worry about type when you want to extract and display. Also seems to me that this would be a great means of daisy-chaining or combining media types. I could have a static image followed by a video followed by another image... all with simple javascript to parse the XML to display the right type at the right time.

Wow - seems like there's a ton of opportunity in this for storing and presenting media types that don't match. As well, will be a great way to put media on a site and add some authentication or limitations to who can get the response back. So I could display on my blog, but someone else who makes the request could get a totally different response!

Comment from kevin on 2008-05-10

2008-05-10T11:31:57Z

pownce has always impressed with its early adoption of standards like oauth, oembed, etc.

but more importantly, standards like oembed will ease the pain for developers which will optimize the implementation of these types of application features and in the end increase user experience across the board.

win win.

good to see this type of post.

Comment from Pawel on 2008-05-14

2008-05-14T10:01:28Z

If anyone is intersted I've created proposal for Zend Framework component Zend_Oembed. Details here: http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFPROP/Zend_Oembed+-+Pawel+Przeradowski. I also have sketchy but working implementation on top of Zend_Http_Client. I'm looking forward to your ideas and feedback.