It does not require an iframe, it is an embed supported by onebox out of the box.
That’s probably your issue - I suspect you cannot view the page of an unlisted video without being logged in - something an anonymous onebox crawl is not going to be able to do.
If you log out of youtube and paste the video link into the browser - what do you see?
It can depend on the type and version of the link, for instance the link for a YouTube live video (https://www.youtube.com/live/- ####) does not correctly one-box but instead renders as:
When I paste the link into our topic here it renders an image (looks like the thumbnail) but not the actual video to play. That’s a step better than what my community displays.
The video is unlisted, not private, as shown below.
My Discourse community is private. Will this have any effect on the embedded video functionality?
As earlier showed embedding works here. So then comes basic questions: does safe mode work, and your forum is on stable on some version if I understood right. Perhaps upgrading helps?
Thanks everyone for the feedback. @JagsterSafe Mode did not help, and I am subscribed to the Standard plan. I cannot say for certain whether I am permitted to use video embedding with this plan level.
Oneboxes should work, as well as allowing other allowed iframes if the onebox doesn’t handle them automatically. You can even upload video too, though you may hit storage limits depending on size.
If you’re still having issues, as a hosted customer you can message @team or email team@discourse.org for direct support and we can take a closer look at your setup and see what the problem might be.