[v3] YouTube oembed returning consent.youtube.com link

[kinglozzer]

This isn’t really an issue with this library (at least, I’m 99% sure it isn’t) so I’ll close this straight away - I just wanted to post it here for visibility, in case someone else like me is searching for this problem and also wondering if they’re alone...

https://youtube.com/oembed is sometimes returning an iframe as expected, and sometimes returning an anchor which links to https://consent.youtube.com:

<a href="https://consent.youtube.com/ml?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D<VIDEOIDHERE>%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&amp;gl=GB&amp;hl=en-GB&amp;pc=yt&amp;uxe=24020388&amp;src=1">
    Before you continue to YouTube
</a>

I can’t recreate this locally, or even reliably on the live site, so it’s really difficult to try to debug what’s happening here. Given that the consent URL wants to redirect to the video, and not https://youtube.com/oembed, I can only assume that it is actually reaching the oembed API and that is returning the consent URL. Requesting the same embed code again later seems to work fine, so my best guess is that it depends which of YouTube’s edge servers responds.

I’ve reported it to YouTube via the “Send Feedback” thing as that’s the only place I could find to report an issue. I have no idea if I should expect a response!

[kinglozzer]

Re-opening as it’s now happening more widely for people (in the UK & EU anyway). Note that this only appears to be happening on v3 of the library, not sure if it’s patchable or if this will just be a “wontfix”.

The problem is that when embedding a URL like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgGzAKP_HuM, v3 of the library will first attempt to fetch that URL itself before it calls the oembed. The original URL redirects to the consent page:

https://consent.youtube.com/m?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DYgGzAKP_HuM&gl=GB&m=0&pc=yt&uxe=23983172&hl=en-GB&src=1

The library then tries to call the oembed endpoint with that URL as the source, instead of the original video URL:

https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fconsent.youtube.com%2Fml%3Fcontinue%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fwatch%253Fv%253DYgGzAKP_HuM%26gl%3DGB%26hl%3Den-GB%26pc%3Dyt%26uxe%3D23983172%26src%3D1&format=json

A patch for this would ideally ensure that the oembed endpoint is called with the original URL. I’ve not investigated how much work that’s likely to be

[oscarotero]

Ok, pull request merged and v3.4.14 published.
Thanks

[kinglozzer]

Thanks @oscarotero! Unfortunately there’s one thing I didn’t take into consideration: when people use short youtu.be URLs instead of the full URL - I’ll submit a new PR for that, it should be a pretty simple tweak

Edit: #436