youtube - Posting an embedded video link using the Facebook Graph API

Question

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.

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

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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

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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 1

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.