Question

My goal: I am trying to allow users to embed a link to a Youtube video in my site, while giving me control over the player’s settings.

I would like to do this by only asking the user to supply the link (not the entire embed code), from where I can somehow paste that link into the embed code.

I’ve tried doing a simple substitution with a few Youtube links (http://youtu.be/...) but they don’t work, saying ‘movie not loaded’. Is there a dependable way to do this?

Answer 1

I do this quite often for clients, the gist of it is that you parse out the ID from the URL, then generate the iframe HTML using this.

def youtube_embed(youtube_url)
  if youtube_url[/youtu\.be\/([^\?]*)/]
    youtube_id = $1
  else
    # Regex from # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3452546/javascript-regex-how-to-get-youtube-video-id-from-url/4811367#4811367
    youtube_url[/^.*((v\/)|(embed\/)|(watch\?))\??v?=?([^\&\?]*).*/]
    youtube_id = $5
  end

  %Q{<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/#{ youtube_id }" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>}
end

youtube_embed('youtu.be/jJrzIdDUfT4')
# => <iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/jJrzIdDUfT4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I put this in a helper. Change the height, width and options to taste.