Youtube videos onebox embedding stopped working

[bletch (Danny Goodall)]

@AntiMetaman

But regular youtube links work. If they banned, wouldn’t all of them not work?

Not the case, @AntiMetaman.

As @codinghorror suggested above, YouTube appears to rate-limit / ban certain formats of YouTube links work where others continue to work.

In my case the ‘/embed’ format of link works but others don’t.

It looks like YouTube provides rate limits that are different per format. The ‘/embed’ one seems to allow for greater numbers. That’s purely anecdotal and I haven’t got any hard data on that.

A few questions

Are you hosting on Digital Ocean?

Are you running IPv6?

Have you checked that the video id is correctly formed - 11 characters? (stupid question - but you’d be suprised

For a given YouTube video have you tried each of the three supported formats? - i.e.

@marcozambi

• http://youtu.be/<videoid>
• https://www.youtube.com/embed/<videoid>
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<videoid>

Which worked and which didn’t?

I have banged my head against this problem for weeks but managed to get a workable solution - but I really don’t understand why it works.

Assuming that you’re seeing the same problem try installing the Onebox Assistant, then enable it but don’t configure it.

I found I needed to bounce the server after enabling it to ensure it worked.

In this configuration - which really should not work at all - my otherwise rate-limited YouTube videos (in any format) get expanded by Onebox - but I have no idea how this works.

I have been discussing the issue with @merefield (the author) here…

https://meta.discourse.org/t/onebox-assistant-crawl-for-those-previews-reliably/107405/36?u=bletch

IF, and it’s a big IF, this also works for you, it’s not a proper fix as it’s just a quirk of method return values and shouldn’t be relied on long-term.

Separately, I’ve also used the Onebox Assistant plugin as it was intended - by subscribing to embed.rocks and it works like a charm.

[Terrapop]

Can you define regular and non-regular YouTube links please.

[Terrapop]

If that is the case, why can’t Onebox convert into the one format that works before polling the data?

[bletch (Danny Goodall)]

It could, I guess, but it’s not a ‘fix’.

All of the formats appear to be rate-limited and eventually fail. Even the ‘/embed’ format failed for me after I tried to re-bake all of the YouTube embeds that had failed during a previous re-bake.

Plus, I’ve only seen two experiences shared on here where the ‘/embed’ route worked where others failed - including my own.

There’s not enough evidence yet, nor enough ‘sufferers’ yet to suggest making a change.

Are you experiencing the problem too, @Terrapop - or are you just an interested party?

[Terrapop]

I’m an interested party as we move our popular community to Discourse soon. Just staging at the moment, it works for now, but we want to have a save setup right from the start, thus we will probably setup with Onebox Assistant to our own endpoint which will relay and cache responses from embeds.rock or if this fails, we will pull from Iframely.

[AntiMetaman]

Ok, so I was just playing around and I was able to reproduce it here on meta.discourse! I believe it has something to do with markdown. My youtu.be links do in fact work my forum as intended just not in the examples below. Youtube isn’t blocking my host at all.

1. This won’t work even on meta.discourse: https://youtu.be/MLpyi-oVoI

See? There’s nothing wrong with the video link. If you put the link on the next line, it still won’t work.

2. This won’t work either:
   https://youtu.be/MLpyi-oVoIY

You see? Now if I paste this same link here, it will work:

COBRA KAI | The Karate Kid Legacy Continues | Netflix

[bletch (Danny Goodall)]

Glad you’re not beling blocked by YouTube. I think everything is working as it should - it’s a formatting issue.

I believe that Onebox expanding needs the link to be a) at the beginning of a line on its own and b) if it is in the middle of a list it needs an additital return / linefeed before it.

If you look at the raw version of your post

https://meta.discourse.org/raw/153748/36

Ok, so I was just playing around and I was able to reproduce it here on meta.discourse! I believe it has something to do with markdown. My youtu.be links do in fact work my forum as intended just not in the examples below. Youtube isn't blocking my host at all.

1. This won't work even on meta.discourse: https://youtu.be/MLpyi-oVoI

See? There's nothing wrong with the video link. If you put the link on the next line, it still won't work.

2. This won't work either:
https://youtu.be/MLpyi-oVoIY

You see? Now if I paste this same link here, it will work:

https://youtu.be/MLpyi-oVoIY

You can see that the first item 1. - the link appears in the middle of the line so it will not expand. The link must be the first thing on the line.

And in item 2. there is only one return / linefeed before the YouTube link so it won’t expand either.

If you look at the formatted version of your post you might be able to see that the YouTube link has a hanging indent…

…which means that markdown is still treating the link as being part of bullet point 2 so it won’t expand it.

You could do this.

1. This is some filler text
2. This link will work as I’ve left two return / linefeeds after this line and before the YouTube link

COBRA KAI | The Karate Kid Legacy Continues | Netflix

[AntiMetaman]

Yea I’ll just have to learn to work with markdown and put youtube links on a separate line. My users are still getting used to it and it’s a post made by a user that caught my attention where their youtu.be link didn’t work which is what led to all this.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

@bletch

If there is a rate-limit issue due to some recent change then I think other users will start to experience this during migration, re-baking of posts or perhaps just down to a really busy forum. The fact that onebox seemingly fails silently means that these issues aren’t visible until users start to complain that YouTube oneboxes are missing.

Hi, I started rebaking 1M+ posts 2 days ago, and youtube previews don’t work anymore since today, so I guess my IP was banned.
What is advised in this case? Should I just wait for the rebake to finish and contact youtube to see if I can be unbanned?
Or use "Onebox Assistant", crawl for those previews reliably!?

[Falco]

@Canapin

Or use “Onebox Assistant”, crawl for those previews reliably! ?

It is certainly a way if you can afford it.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

How to know if we’re actually IP banned or not?

I did like this:

@marcozambi

I have the root cause: Youtube banned our IP, but it’s not clear why as at the time this happened we were not doing any massive rebake or similar.

But it downloaded the video without any issue.

root@ubuntu-8gb-hel1-4:~# youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl-PTTeRsik
[youtube] Xl-PTTeRsik: Downloading webpage
[youtube] Xl-PTTeRsik: Downloading MPD manifest
[download] Destination: Loading cargo into HTV-9 Konutori-Xl-PTTeRsik.mp4
[download] 100% of 11.41MiB in 00:01

Maybe my problem comes from somewhere else then?

I have a 404 when Discourse tries to oneboxes a youtube link.

[bletch (Danny Goodall)]

I haven’t got a lot of time to respond at the moment, but a few comments.

1. Have all the re-bake jobs worked their way through sidekiq at the moment? Does https://yourforum/sidekiq show lots of jobs? If so, then it could just be that the Onebox-ing is taking time.

2. Take a look at this diagnostic that I carried out and attempt to reproduce the process and report back.

Youtube videos onebox embedding stopped working

Here are some more results. Note, there are many assumptions in the post below - based on a lack of real knowledge. I’ll follow this post up with my opinion of what is going on and what should happen. Thanks for the response, Robert. Note that Oneboxing of videos using the /watch route were (and still are!) failing when I tried this so I didn’t need a loop to force it to fail. So one assumption I’ve made is that the user-agent that Onebox is using is Discourse Forum Onebox v2.6.0.beta1 base…

3. If YouTube banned you midway through a re-bake then you’re going to have to re-bake again as you won’t know what posts with embedded links have been processed or not. I actually wrote a utility to reformat YouTube posts and rebake in chunks.

4. Sadly, the Oneboxer seems to fail without a message so it’s difficult to know what the cause of it is. I had to fork and modify @merefield’s plugin to log the error messages to find out that I was getting 429 errors. You’re welcome to use my fork but it’s a bit of a hack and (I’ve just noticed) it’s a couple of commits behind Roberts.

GitHub - DannyGoodall/discourse-onebox-assistant: Discourse plugin to provide...

5. If you are being rate-limited (you see 429 errors from YouTube) then I had success installing @merefield’s Onebox Assistant and enabling it but not changing any settings. i.e. leaving all settings blank. WARNING THIS IS WEIRD AND SHOULDN’T WORK BUT IT DOES.

See my posts here

https://meta.discourse.org/t/onebox-assistant-crawl-for-those-previews-reliably/107405/35?u=bletch

and here

https://meta.discourse.org/t/onebox-assistant-crawl-for-those-previews-reliably/107405/36?u=bletch

6. Finally, to answer your questions about embed.rocks, I have signed up for an account with embed.rocks, tested it with the Onebox Assistant and it worked perfectly during a partial rebake. I have, however, since unconfigured it because it works with the weird behaviour described in 5.

[bletch (Danny Goodall)]

@Canapin

I have a 404 when Discourse tries to oneboxes a youtube link.

In a forum that has been around for a while, it’s common to have once genuine YouTube links go stale. Videos are removed due to copyright or accounts being closed and so those links don’t work. Is it possible you’re seeing this?

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Hi,

@bletch

In a forum that has been around for a while, it’s common to have once genuine YouTube links go stale. Videos are removed due to copyright or accounts being closed and so those links don’t work. Is it possible you’re seeing this?

No, the video work

@bletch

• Have all the re-bake jobs worked their way through sidekiq at the moment? Does https://yourforum/sidekiq show lots of jobs? If so, then it could just be that the Onebox-ing is taking time.

There are still 900000 of the 1.3M posts remaining to be rebaked (will take at least a week), but oneboxing was working perfectly on new posts one or two days ago.

Now, if create a new post with a youtube link, or if I rebuild the HTML of post which already contains a youtube link, this is the 404 error I get:

Other oneboxes work well (tried vimeo, twitter…).

edit: re-read posts here, and it appears that I have the same issues as you guys.

@marcozambi

Yesterday YouTube removed our ban and we’re back in business.

When you say they removed your ban in your message, I understand that you didn’t contact them, the ban was lifted without doing anything?

I don’t really care if my old posts don’t have embedded videos, but I care about new posts.
My forum isn’t open yet, and I’d like to offer my user a good experience.

edit : sorry for the multiple edit guys.
I tried the weird workaround described here: "Onebox Assistant", crawl for those previews reliably!
And it does work. I guess I’ll let the “rebake all” end, and since it seems that Youtube lift IP bans automatically, I’ll just wait a few days/weeks.

[Saiano]

Hi,
My forum stops one boxing youtube videos.
We started a topic with a lot of music videos a week ago and it seems that we have the same problem of @marcozambi oneboxing gets 404 error.
So, What should I do?

[legrit (Alex Legrand)]

hello I have the same problem however :

• my server doesn’t seem to be ip-banned : the curl request does work with no problem (also I can browse youtube from my server)

• In my browser console I don’t have a 404 error but a 504 gateway timeout

• also no version of the url works for me

however I have this SSL error in discourse production.log

Failed to onebox https://www.youtube.com/post/***** hostname "www.youtube.com" does not match the server certificate (OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError) ["/usr/local/lib/ruby/2.7.0/openssl/ssl.rb:395:in 'post_connection_check'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/ssl_socket.rb:146:in 'initialize'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/connection.rb:471:in 'new'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/connection.rb:471:in 'socket'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/connection.rb:118:in 'request_call'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/middlewares/mock.rb:57:in 'request_call'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/middlewares/instrumentor.rb:34:in 'request_call'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/middlewares/idempotent.rb:19:in 'request_call'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/middlewares/base.rb:22:in 'request_call'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/middlewares/base.rb:22:in 'request_call'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon/connection.rb:283:in 'request'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/excon-0.78.1/lib/excon.rb:250:in 'head'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/final_destination.rb:186:in 'public_send'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/final_destination.rb:186:in 'resolve'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/oneboxer.rb:365:in 'block in external_onebox'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/cache.rb:94:in 'fetch'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/oneboxer.rb:358:in 'external_onebox'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/oneboxer.rb:199:in 'onebox_raw'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/oneboxer.rb:44:in 'preview'", "/var/www/discourse/app/controllers/onebox_controller.rb:27:in 'block in show'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/hijack.rb:56:in 'instance_eval'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/hijack.rb:56:in 'block in hijack'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/scheduler/defer.rb:94:in 'block in do_work'", "/var/www/discourse/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/rails_multisite-2.5.0/lib/rails_multisite/connection_management.rb:76:in 'with_connection'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/scheduler/defer.rb:89:in 'do_work'", "/var/www/discourse/lib/scheduler/defer.rb:79:in 'block (2 levels) in start_thread'"]

I can’t understand why my server would suddenly think youtube.com certificate don’t match the url

[Falco]

@legrit can you share what is the URL you are trying to embed? Also try to run this on your server:

cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
curl -vI https://www.youtube.com

and paste the output here.

[legrit (Alex Legrand)]

I fixed the problem

in /etc/resolv.conf in the docker container I had the ip of my server as first address and google 8.8.8.8 as second address
I removed the first address and it worked

not totally sure what was going on
youtube was the only site inaccessible from the container

[Overgrow (OG)]

My Youtube embeds are failing …

Seems like there is redirect to “consent” page. This is working well on meta.

Anything has changed lately?

[Richie (Richie Rich)]

@Overgrow please see: Youtube embeddings have stopped working for servers in Europe