Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 17, 2026

OEmbed

oEmbed is an open format designed to allow embedding content from a website into any webpage. The specification was created by Cal Henderson, Leah Culver, Mike Malone, and Richard Crowley in 2008. It is used by companies like Twitter to make tweets embeddable in blog posts and by blogging platforms like Medium to allow content authors to include those snippets.

Last revised
Jun 17, 2026
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Wikipedia ↗

oEmbed is an open format designed to allow embedding content from a website into any webpage. The specification was created by Cal Henderson, Leah Culver, Mike Malone, and Richard Crowley in 2008.1 It is used by companies like Twitter to make tweets embeddable in blog posts2 and by blogging platforms like Medium to allow content authors to include those snippets.3

An oEmbed exchange occurs between a consumer and a provider. A consumer wishes to show an embedded representation of a third-party resource on their own website, such as a photo or an embedded video. A provider implements the oEmbed API to allow consumers to fetch that representation.

The following software is able to embed content from websites that support oEmbed:

Examples

Request: 

https://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=https%3A//youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DM3r2XDceM6A&format=json

Response: 


{
	"version": "1.0",
	"type": "video",
	"provider_name": "YouTube",
	"provider_url": "https://youtube.com/",
	"width": 425,
	"height": 344,
	"title": "Amazing Nintendo Facts",
	"author_name": "ZackScott",
	"author_url": "https://www.youtube.com/user/ZackScott",
	"html":
		"<object width=\"425\" height=\"344\">
			<param name=\"movie\" value=\"https://www.youtube.com/v/M3r2XDceM6A&fs=1\"></param>
			<param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"></param>
			<param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\"></param>
			<embed src=\"https://www.youtube.com/v/M3r2XDceM6A&fs=1\"
				type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"425\" height=\"344\"
				allowscriptaccess=\"always\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"></embed>
		</object>",
}


References

References

  1. "Announcing OEmbed - An Open Standard for Embedded Content". Leah Culver's Blog. Archived from the original on 2012-01-12. Retrieved 2017-10-26.
  2. Etienne, Stefan. "Twitter intros three new ways to embed timelines". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-10-26.
  3. "Embedding". Medium Support. Retrieved 2017-10-26.
  4. "Embeds « Drupal". www.drupal.org. 12 April 2020. Retrieved 2022-04-06.
  5. "Humhub Documentation - oEmbed". Retrieved 2024-01-10.
  6. "Embedding Content in LinkedIn Posts Using oEmbed". Retrieved 2022-04-23.
  7. "Using the Embed Block". Retrieved 2018-10-02.
  8. "Embeds « WordPress Codex". codex.wordpress.org. Retrieved 2017-12-18.
External links