Since a few days (I’d say just after updating to Discourse 2.5 beta 5 - and continues on beta 6 - but it can well be a coincidence) embedding of YouTube videos works itermittently. After a few hours not working, it just restarts embedding OK. Since yesterday, it stopped working completely. I don’t see any specific suspicious error in the forum logs. Could it be a timeout problem? Is there a way to specifically investigate this? Thanks in advance!

The browser can’t give you the real reason a onebox is failing. You need to try and make a similar request from your server.

I understand what you are suggesting, but: if I repeat the simple GET call (passing headers and stuff as expected) to /onebox?url=… i simply get the error HTML 404 if I repeat, on the server, the request that onebox does, copying it from the ruby code of youtube_onebox.rb, that is curl 'curl 'https://www.youtube.com/oembed?format=json&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl-PTTeRsik' for one of the non-ebmedded video, it seems to work perfectly. The call actually returns: {"author_name":"AstronautiCAST","version":"1.0","height":270,"author_url":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/AstronautiCAST","provider_name":"YouTube","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/","thumbnail_height":360,"width":480,"html":"\u003ciframe width=\"480\" height=\"270\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Xl-PTTeRsik?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e","type":"video","thumbnail_width":480,"title":"Loading cargo into HTV-9 Konutori","thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/Xl-PTTeRsik\/hqdefault.jpg"}root@fait-2020:/var/discourse# which contains all that onebox needs for embedding. I don’t get it :confused:

@Falco really sorry to bother you, but the lack of youtube oneboxing is really crippling the user experience of our forum. Yesterday I tried several things, such as trying to read the source code (to understand at what stage and what kind of condition could trigger the return of a 404 from onebox) and up to the point of cloning the current production forum to a new, separate Digital Ocean droplet. Reading the code was not really helping, mainly due to my lack of real knowledge of the platform. One question remains open on this: is the oneboxing process logging somewhere? It would be so useful to understand the error that brings onebox to give up and return 404. The clone Droplet was a tentative to check whether the IP of the productions server was banned by Youtube and at the same time whether there was something related to the domain name we use. Well, even though IP address and domain name were different, the YouTube oneboxing was not working. I really hope somebody can suggest me at least a way to trace what the oneboxing does.

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. [image] Question for @Falco or @codinghorror: was the install of 2.5.0beta 5 or 6 triggering any rebake, which would have exceeded the request limit?

No we didn’t add any recent rebakes. Sound like a YouTube change, as other users complained too.

Thanks everybody for the replies. It remains unclear to me though why if I mimic the request that the onebox engine does (or at least I expect this to be the case. Is it @Falco?) then I get a JSON response with a proper answer, and not a 429. [image] Is there another request done by Onebox that gets a 429, before performing the request as per my screenshot, that is curl 'https://www.youtube.com/oembed?format=json&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl-PTTeRsik' ? It goes without saying that this requests were made from the very server running Discourse (so same outgoing IP).

One curl statement is unlikely trip a rate limit? Try a series of them in quick succession? Run it in a repetitive bash script? (But not too much or you might get banned)

Well, simply trying to recook a single post with a single link to youtube gets us a 404 from onebox…

An interesting finding after a weekend of troubleshooting. This can maybe be something you want to have a look into @Falco or @codinghorror? At the moment, reading the source code of youtube_onebox.rb , I see it supports 3 URLs from which the video id is extracted. http://youtu.be/ https://www.youtube.com/embed/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Every attempt to onebox videos whose links are in 1. and 3. formats fail with onebox returning 404 (which I think is related to our IP being banned) When I try to embed links having format as 2., it works! I wonder if and how this could be related to the fact explained in this post. Some understanding (and logging) of the inner working of onebox (i.e. what exact call(s) is(are) made to youtube) would be super useful…

Youtube videos onebox embedding stopped working

Product Support

merefield (Robert) June 7, 2020, 3:43pm 9

Try a proxy crawl using "Onebox Assistant", crawl for those previews reliably!

Topic		Replies	Views
Youtube embeds missing Product Support	50	4942	September 25, 2021
"Onebox Assistant", crawl for those previews reliably! Plugin onebox	96	13085	May 9, 2025
Youtube embeddings have stopped working for servers in Europe Bug	37	5423	April 9, 2021
YouTube URIs fail to render thumbnails when oneboxed Bug composer , onebox	11	623	November 12, 2025
Video embeds from facebook.com and other sites fail Bug	24	6105	May 6, 2020

Youtube videos onebox embedding stopped working

Related topics