oEmbed & PHP Basic Introduction

oEmbed is a format for allowing embedded content off a URL on third party sites. This simple API allows a website to display embedded content from for example Youtube. So you can only use the url of a Youtube video and get the video player back, it's that simple.

No parsing of html is needed because you'll get the embedded code back from Youtube, so this should be OK, in many cases you only store the url in your db.

Now we'll get the video player of a random video from Youtube, let's take this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THE_hhk1Gzc

This is the entire code:

        $url = "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THE_hhk1Gzc";

        $encoded_url = "http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=".rawurlencode($url)."&format=json";
        $curl = curl_init($encoded_url);
       
        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        $return = curl_exec($curl);
        curl_close($curl);
       
        $json_content = json_decode($return, true);
       
        echo $json_content['html']

Let's break it down:

        $encoded_url = "http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=".rawurlencode($url)."&format=json";

So here we define the url to call filling the url & format parameter with the needed url and format. So url being: "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THE_hhk1Gzc" and the format "json".

        $curl = curl_init($encoded_url);

        curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
        $return = curl_exec($curl);
        curl_close($curl);

Next we initialise curl, because we'll use curl to do the call, we execute the call and store the returned data in a variable and close the connection.

       $json_content = json_decode($return, true);

Next we decode the returned data, since it's json format we use the json_decode function. And finally we print out the player.

        echo $json_content['html']

This is a basic usage off oEmbed with PHP, off course it can be much more secure than this, but this a basic introduction and can be used for several services like Vimeo, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, Metacafé, Soundcloud and many more.

More information about oEmbed can be found http://oembed.com/.