Using Chrome browser, when I share a link from my website on facebook, the 'preview' is a video in mp4 format i.e not swf format. The problem is that a download button is showing up on the video player on facebook.
Based on this post I was able to remove the download button on my website using controlsList="nodownload" attribute, but I still can't remove it from facebook posts.
As far as I know, this video preview is built based just OG metatags, which I believe are correct:
<meta property="og:video:url" content="https://cdn.domain.com/path/to/video/file.mp4" />
<meta property="og:video:secure_url" content="https://cdn.domain.com/path/to/video/file.mp4" />
<meta property="og:video:width" content="768" />
<meta property="og:video:height" content="432" />
<meta property="og:video:type" content="video/mp4" />
Question: Is there anything I can do to fix this or does it depends 100% on facebook?
Note: Due to privacy policies I can't share here an example but here is an example with similar OG metatags, post it on your facebook timeline and you'll see the download button as shown in this screenshot example below : https://i.stack.imgur.com/mck0N.png
Thanks.
Question: Is there anything I can do to fix this or does it depends 100% on facebook?
This is entirely on Facebook's end.
You've provided Facebook with the URL to your video content. How they present it is up to them.
I am trying to share video from my site on facebook. I want the video should play on facebook rather than redirecting me on my site when i clicks on it. I have used this but it didn't work
<meta property="og:video" content="http://website.com/files/Video.mp4" />
<meta property="og:type" content="video.movie">
<meta property="og:video:secure_url" content="https://server.com/files/Video.mp4" />
<meta property="og:video:type" content="video/mp4" />
I have try to debug it using debug tool and its looks everything is perfect. Most of the example on web is explaining about sharing ".swf" files. I am wondering how can i share ".mp4" for video because its really hard for me to convert all the video into ".swf" format
Here is a sample url that i am trying to share
http://perform-ers.com/channel/people-are-awesome/watch?m=664
As you already found out; you need to link to a SWF file, which is the video player and which in turn (knows how to) include the video to play. You can't directly link to a MP4 file.
I'm looking to embed an HTML5 video player in the Facebook feed, similar to what sites like YouTube and Vimeo do already, using the "text/html" tag:
<meta property="og:type" content="video">
<meta property="og:video:url" content="...">
<meta property="og:video:secure_url" content="...">
<meta property="og:video:type" content="text/html">
As I understand this requires whitelisting from Facebook currently, and when I use the same tags I just see a white box with a "Download File" link.
This is expected, however as my site has not launched yet and I do not know the final URL, I'm not able to apply for whitelisting, currently I just need to be able to demo this behavior.
Is there any way of enabling this feature in test just to show how it would work and begin developing the Facebook integration before asking about whitelisting?
What do I have to do to get the play button on a video thumbnail?
I tried using open graph parameters to show facebook that the URL is a website containing a video but I could not figure it out.
Defining a Flash video file associated with the page places a play button over your thumbnail image (now essentially a poster frame) and loads your linked video file on a user click or tap. It's possible to specify multiple video formats with an array of structured video properties: Flash, MP4, and WebM for example. Facebook currently supports Flash and HTML video links, roughly correlated to and content includes on your own web pages. Everything in one URL means you will have to move your FlashVars into query parameters except; width and height FlashVars are passed by Facebook at runtime.
<meta property="og:video" content="http://example.com/movie.swf?id=1">
<meta property="og:video:secure_url" content="https://example.com/movie.swf?id=1">
<meta property="og:video:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash">
<meta property="og:video:width" content="400">
<meta property="og:video:height" content="300">
The "secure_url" property is required to play inline video for users browsing Facebook with HTTPS enabled. Facebook does not currently support direct MP4 or WebM videos but may add support in the future through a Facebook video playback wrapper. Publishers need to account for framed content with AllowScriptAccess set to "none."
I'm trying to set up a page which can be properly scraped by Facebook when it's shared/liked. The page will have a YouTube video associated with it, so in the content attribute of the og:video tag, should I put the YouTube video embed link or the actual youtube page link for it to appear on Facebook with the little "Preview" button that plays the video in Facebook?
Hope someone can help! Thanks!
You have two options. You can either set the og:video to https://www.youtube.com/v/YOUTUBECODE or set the og:url to the YouTube page.
In my examples, I'm embedding this video https://www.youtube.com/v/BQBjVr1iHH4 in the following page https://www.keithandthegirl.com/vip/bonus/episode/9/40/this-is-40. I would like Facebook to show the YouTube video whenever anyone shares my page on Facebook.
Option 1: setting the og:video to https://www.youtube.com/v/YOUTUBECODE
The meta tag will look like
<meta property='og:video' content='https://www.youtube.com/v/BQBjVr1iHH4' />
Notice the structure of the YouTube URL is different than the typical URL. You will need to isolate the "v" query from the YouTube link and use it in the og:video link format I showed above. In my example, the value of v is BQBjVr1iHH4.
Option 2: setting the og:url to the YouTube page.
If you don't have the ability to isolate the v code, you can set the og:url tag to the YouTube page. In my example, it would look like this:
<meta property='og:url' content='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQBjVr1iHH4' />
This will tell Facebook to get the Open Graph tags from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQBjVr1iHH4 and use that in the embed. That means the description and title will come from the YouTube page. However, if someone clicks the link, they'll go to your website.
In my example, if someone pastes the following link while I use the second option https://www.keithandthegirl.com/vip/bonus/episode/9/40/this-is-40 Facebook will see the URL is set to YouTube and query that YouTube link for the OG info. Everything will look like YouTube except the link will click to https://www.keithandthegirl.com/vip/bonus/episode/9/40/this-is-40
One other note: make sure to use https, not http. Facebook will not embed any non-secure video on the site.
Here's what I found:
Using Facebook's Open Graph Protocol, Publisher can now use any video from any URL, as long as the URL has correctly formatted metadata in the <head> of its HTML. Here's the list of information that should be in the <head>:
Thumbnail image's URL:
<meta property="og:image" content="image_src URL">
Video file URL (e.g. SWF, MP4, ..):
<meta property="og:video" content="video_src URL">
Your page's URL:
<meta property="og:url" content="URL">
Title:
<meta property="og:title" content="title">
Description:
<meta property="og:description" content="description">
Video pixel width:
<meta property="og:video:width" content="video_width">
Video pixel height:
<meta property="og:video:height" content="video_height">
Content Type:
<meta property="og:type" content="video">
You can see from the source code of a YouTube page, the og:video tag is in the following format
<meta property="og:video" content="http://www.youtube.com/v/k86xpd26M2g">
You can also see an example of the metadata used from YouTube simplified in the source code of the following URL: http://fb.stevelarsen.co.uk/example.html
You can read more about the Open Graph protocol here: http://ogp.me/
<html xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
<!-- ... -->
<!-- [REQUIRED TAGS] -->
<meta property="og:video" content="http://example.com/awesome.flv" />
<meta property="og:video:height" content="640" />
<meta property="og:video:width" content="385" />
<meta property="og:video:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
...
</head>
The link of the .flv file.... check out https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/#types
For those who stumbled at the debugger provided by facebook please note the following:
When you are logged into the debugger you are under https session. In order to see your video in the debugging you need to add the secure url for video in meta. Adding youtube videos is easy, simply put the page url in og:url and it will work.
Spent and hour to come to this conclusion. Its too late I am too tired, wanna sleep now :)
I figured it out. I had a look at how Collegehumor.com does it and they include a bunch of stuff not mentioned in the Facebook API. Rather than just the following:
<meta name="og:video" content="whatever"></meta>
<meta name="video_style" content="whatever"></meta>
<meta name="video_height" content="whatever"></meta>
<meta name="video_width" content="whatever"></meta>
you also need link rel="video_src" and it helps to have videothumbnail and og:image too - I'm not entirely sure which one did it but there you go. That works :)