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Trouble with facebook wall player embed

10 replies [Last post]
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Could someone see if I am doing the meta tags correctly to get a botr video to play on a facebook wall. Here is the page to be shared: http://www.smith.edu/video/videodesignclinic.php

I have looked at the tutorial but I can't get the play button to appear.
Thanks!
-Jeff

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Hi Jeff, Sahring this video with play button worked for me.

On the first share page (where you can set thumbnail and edit share text, there is no play button, but once the sharing is finalized it shows a play button.

You can see an example here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/196804267007675

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Hi Remco,
I guess I don't see the sharing getting finalized. Still no play button for my link or big buck bunny link on the test group page for me. They will not play embedded on the facebook page for me, but take me to the link page instead. Tried safari and firefox on mac.

Here is the facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/smithcollege/posts/226848134014889

This gets posted as a link by the page admin.

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I see a play button for both items (your video and our bunny) on the test page.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe Facebook has some fuzzy rules about when player controls show. If the play button shows in some cases the basic configuration must be correct, but there might be a possibility that Facebook will only show third party players if a visitor is a member of the group or something...

The strangest thing is that on the post that you link to I don't see the play button, but if I go to the profile page (http://www.facebook.com/smithcollege), I do see the play button on the thumbnail and the player loading correctly (both in Chrome and Firefox).

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Then it might be a funky caching thing between facebook and me. I checked with another person and sure enough, they get the play button as well. Still I don't know why big buck bunny also does not work for me while other viemeo and youtube links are fine... Ugh, Facebook has tricked me again...

Thanks!

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I figured it out. It is the https setting. I have facebook defaulting to https and the play button disappears in that case. That is why I couldn't see big buck bunny in your link either, facebook was redirecting me to https automatically.

Maybe there is some other setting for https users that is needed in the meta section? Youtube still works under https for instance.

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I am pretty sure that if Facebook is in HTTPS mode, it will not show external players because that will result in mixed content warnings. Our contentserver supports https as well, so it is very well possible that if you replace all http://content.bitsontherun.com/... links with https://content.bitsontherun.com/... it will work in Facebook (unless Facebook made some hard exception for YouTube, I can't tell for sure).

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Well now I am trying to integrate opengraph tags into our drupal environment. The drupal module appears to be adding the tags correctly, but I am not getting facebook to notice the share. Here is the facebook test share: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Smith-College-Relations-fb-testing/16633032220?sk=wall
You can see the a non-drupal test from July is working but the most current test from drupal is not.

I am testing this on our development drupal site so link will not work with htaccess info (which I can send offline via email if you need it), but here is the relevant code from the page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#">
  <head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>Mountain Day With The Noteables | Smith College</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/sites/default/files/smithframe_favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Happy Mountain Day 2011 from the Smith College Noteables. Shot on location at Outlook Farms." />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://content.bitsontherun.com/thumbs/wBxs8AsQ-320.jpg" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="www.smith.edu" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Mountain Day with the Noteables" />
<meta property="og:type" content="movie" />

<meta property="og:url" content="http://content.bitsontherun.com/previews/wBxs8AsQ-AC28DJOr" />
<meta property="og:video" content="http://content.bitsontherun.com/players/wBxs8AsQ-AC28DJOr.swf" />
<meta property="og:video:height" content="270" />
<meta property="og:video:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
<meta property="og:video:width" content="480" />

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I think you need to change

<meta property="og:video" content="http://content.bitsontherun.com/players/wBxs8AsQ-AC28DJOr.swf" />

to

<meta property="og:video" content="https://content.bitsontherun.com/players/wBxs8AsQ-AC28DJOr.swf" />

video embeds that use http will cause security errors with Facebook in https mode, so Facebook strips them out.

Then reset the Facebook cache of your page on http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug and try sharing to facebook again.

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The link was to our dev sever with .htaccess in front. Facebook would still share the link, but it could not scrape the page at all. Thanks for the debug tool which helped me determine that.

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Oh, yes, we worked out the whole story via email. Thanks for keeping the thread updated in case someone else runs into this.

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