We’ve developed a gem called oembed_links to help ease oembed usage in a Rails app ( and elsewhere ). libxml_ruby, hpricot and rexml support, as well as Haml, Erubis and ERB template output support. (oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.)