Noembed — oEmbed everything.

oEmbed is nice. Unfortunately, not everything supports oEmbed. Worse, the sites that do support it don't provide a consistent interface. Noembed provides a single url to get embeddable content from a large list of sites, even sites without oEmbed support!

Additionally, Noembed guarantees that all responses will have html, title, url, and provider_name fields. This means fewer special cases spent building up your own HTML.

A simple demo is available here.

Usage

Treat Noembed like a regular oEmbed provider, but use any of the supported sites for the url parameter. Noembed also supports a callback parameter for JSONP.

An example request might look like this:

http://noembed.com/embed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DbDOYN-6gdRE&callback=my_embed_function

And the response will look like:

my_embed_function(
  {
    "width" : 425,
    "author_name" : "schmoyoho",
    "author_url" : "http://www.youtube.com/user/schmoyoho",
    "version" : "1.0",
    "provider_url" : "http://www.youtube.com/",
    "provider_name" : "YouTube",
    "thumbnail_width" : 480,
    "thumbnail_url" : "http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/bDOYN-6gdRE/hqdefault.jpg",
    "height" : 344,
    "thumbnail_height" : 360,
    "html" : "<iframe type='text/html' width='425' height='344' src='http://www.youtube.com/embed/bDOYN-6gdRE' frameborder=0></iframe>",
    "url" : "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDOYN-6gdRE",
    "type" : "rich",
    "title" : "Auto-Tune the News #8: dragons. geese. Michael Vick. (ft. T-Pain)"
  }
) 

Note: Chrome now blocks insecure scripts from loading on secure sites. So, when using Noembed with JSONP on an https site be sure to use https://noembed.com/embed.

Supported sites

Existing oEmbed

• Viddler
• Qik
• Hulu

Improved oEmbed

• Flickr - Photo links are put into an <img> tag.
• Github gists - Includes the full gist instead of only the first 3 lines.
• YouTube - Uses an <iframe> so HTML5 video works. Preserves jump timecode (e.g. #t=5m30s).
• Vimeo - Sets <iframe> width to 640 instead of native video width, which can get huge.

Other

• Twitter
• Wikipedia (including sub-sections)
• Github commits
• Giant Bomb
• Twitpic
• Urban Dictionary
• Beer Advocate
• Ascii Art Farts
• Instagr.am
• Github commits
• Spotify
• Imgur
• Instagram
• YFrog
• CloudApp
• Skitch
• Ars Technica (comments)
• IMDB
• Amazon product pages
• Path images
• Bash.org quotes
• XKCD
• Trailer Addict
• rapgenius
• TED
• Soundcloud
• Picplz
• Lockerz

The /providers endpoint

Noembed provides an endpoint that returns the current list of supported sites. The response is a JSON list with the site name and URL patterns. This can be used to automate testing if a URL is supported by Noembed without making an HTTP request.

Development

All the source code for Noembed is on github. Patches are accepted to add new services. To write a new provider, inherit from the Noembed::Source and define provider_name, patterns, and serialize methods. Take a look at an existing source for an example.

Similar sites

Oohembed is a very similar service. It even acts as a gateway to non-oEmbed enabled sites. The main limitation that I encountered was its lack of a guaranteed html field. Also, it is popular so it regularly goes over its usage limits.

embed.ly. I have not tried this service, but it lists support for hundreds of sites. Unfortunately, you can not add your own providers, so you are limited to what they support.

© 2011 Lee Aylward