Disable automatic oEmbed of a youtube url within the content

Question

I run a small site based on wp with user generated content. Users often submit youtube links. And then wordpress automatically converts these links to videos which is unwanted in our case. I need to override this automatic behavior so that the submitted youtube links remains in plain text urls ?

I found out that I could remove the oembed provider itself with something like wp_oembed_remove_provider('http://www.youtube.com/oembed') but I am stumped at how do I use this in my case where $content is the string that contains the url as well as the submitted post content ? The codex page doesnot says much about it. Could someone give me an example of how this can be done.

In other words I need the oEmbed to skip any youtube link/s in content. Also please let me know if there is a better/more efficient way of solving this.

Answer 1

disable the oembed like below in functions.php :

remove_filter( 'the_content', array( $GLOBALS['wp_embed'], 'autoembed' ), 8 );

Thanks!

Answer 2

The accepted answer didn't work in my case. URLs were still being converted to embeds in the post editor.

By looking at the source of wp-includes/class-wp-embed.php where this stuff is handled, I found that there are some other things at play here:

// Hack to get the [embed] shortcode to run before wpautop()
add_filter( 'the_content', array( $this, 'run_shortcode' ), 8 );

// Shortcode placeholder for strip_shortcodes()
add_shortcode( 'embed', '__return_false' );

// Attempts to embed all URLs in a post
add_filter( 'the_content', array( $this, 'autoembed' ), 8 );

// After a post is saved, cache oEmbed items via AJAX
add_action( 'edit_form_advanced', array( $this, 'maybe_run_ajax_cache' ) );

What fixed the issue for me was disabling these in my theme files like so:

remove_shortcode( 'embed' );
remove_filter( 'the_content', [ $GLOBALS['wp_embed'], 'autoembed' ], 8 );
remove_filter( 'the_content', [ $GLOBALS['wp_embed'], 'run_shortcode' ], 8 );
remove_action( 'edit_form_advanced', [ $GLOBALS['wp_embed'], 'maybe_run_ajax_cache' ] );