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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T17:44:43+00:00

I have an application that posts music videos from YouTube to a Facebook user’s

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I have an application that posts music videos from YouTube to a Facebook user’s wall. The post on Facebook would have this embed video be playable from Facebook. Recently it stopped happening.

After some testing, it seems that when one makes the graph API post with the source being a YouTube video, then the link also needs youtube.com in the domain for it to be playable within a Facebook context.

To repeat:

You can take a look for yourself by logging into Facebook and going here:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer

Then get an access token with read_stream and publish_stream permissions (extended permissions tab).

Switch from GET to POST and set the endpoint to /me/feed with the following fields:

message = message
description = description
name = name
caption = caption
link = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1dfEf1qOt4
source = http://www.youtube.com/e/r1dfEf1qOt4
picture = http://img.youtube.com/vi/r1dfEf1qOt4/0.jpg

It should show up on your Facebook wall and be playable.

Now do it again, but change the link to http://www.google.com.
It is no longer playable.

Can anyone confirm if this is expected behavior? I can’t find anything in the Facebook docs. Perhaps I am just missing something?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Generalized Workaround

    I generalized the answer to this similar question: posting a swf in facebook feed through facebook api. I created a page that takes two parameters and generates the necessary meta tags. Facebook accepts the link, the user is correctly redirected, and you don’t need a separate page for each posted video.

    1. url – the final URL
    2. id – the id of the youtube or embedded video

    I successfully made numerous embedded posts in which the link was not associated with the video.

    Example Post

    message = Post message
description = Post description if needed.
name = Post name
caption = Post caption
link = http://vbcopper.com/jsuar/so/fbembedvideo.php?url=stackoverflow.com&id=QGAJokcwBXI
source = http://www.youtube.com/e/QGAJokcwBXI
picture = http://img.youtube.com/vi/QGAJokcwBXI/0.jpg

    PHP

    <?php
 $id =  $_GET["id"];
 $url =  $_GET["url"];

 if ( isset($url) ) {
echo <<< EOT
<html>
<head>
    <title>$url</title>
    <meta property="og:title" content="Page Title" />
    <meta property="og:type" content="website"/>
    <meta property="og:description" content="Content for Description" />
    <meta property="og:image" content="http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/$id/mqdefault.jpg" />
    <meta property="og:site_name" content="Content for caption"/>
    <meta property="og:video" content="http://www.youtube.com/v/$id?version=3&autohide=1">
    <meta property="og:video:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash">
    <meta property="og:video:width" content="640">
    <meta property="og:video:height" content="360">
    <META http-equiv="refresh" content="1;URL=http://$url">

</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
EOT;
} else {
    echo "Nothing here...";
}
?>

    Findings

    I was able to successfully replicate your issue. I could find no work around.

    This has been submitted as a bug to Facebook but deemed low priority.

    Bugs: Posting video to feed with link attribute doesn’t embed the source
    https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/502967809730190?browse=search_5074a2e48fd360934230075

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