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Youtube videos are gone

m_pattiruhu

Today I got emails from students asking me where my videos have gone. As it turns out, Canvas stripped the IFRAMEs which used to embed a Youtube video, of the SRC-element. Now all I get is empty IFRAMEs. ('<iframe width="560" height="314" loading="lazy" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>')

I only checked about 10 pages, but I may have about 80 pages containing hundreds of my own videos, hosted on Youtube.

Am I the only one having this issue? Is this going to be resolved?

p.s. I always add videos to a page in the HTML-editor, because adding a Youtube video in the Rich Text Editor doesn't work properly for me.

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Accepted answers

Chris

I'd encourage everyone here to contact Canvas support on this one. I've seen a few different community threads about this behavior. Even if Instructure is aware of the issue already (which they probably are), reports to support will help prioritize the fix and also get everyone who reports the issue on the list to get notified when a fix is rolled out.

-Chris

All comments

james_whalley

@m_pattiruhu How did you originally embed the YouTube videos? When I check ones I already had embedded, they still seem to work. When I try to embed new ones, they seem to work as well.

james_whalley

@m_pattiruhu Do you happen to have Canvas Plus, Canvas Next, r Canvas Studio?

m_pattiruhu

I don't know which version my school has. I am a teacher, not an admin. We do have Canvas Studio, but I would really like to keep my videos on Youtube.

When I embed a new video I get "<iframe class="lti-embed …""

Maybe this new class is what allows an external video to be embedded. My IFRAMES do not inherit the class "lti-embed". Maybe that's the problem.

ElijahDow

I'm an instructional designer and I just heard from a faculty member that this has also happened to. So far this is the only incident I've heard of it happening here. I have no idea how to fix this quickly… all of the source info is gone, as described above, and just an empty iframe is left behind. So there's no way for me to even replace the videos because I have no reference as to which videos were there. I even tried importing an older export of this course (exported May 11) and on importing it to a new shell, the same issue persists. No videos on any pages.

abrgomez

Have this happening to me as well, but only on some videos. I cannot even retrieve the video src from previous versions in the page history, it's removed for all versions. I had to go find an export .imscc I created as backup a while ago, and the only difference I noticed between the videos that got removed and the ones that didn't was that the ones that were deleted are missing the http: part of the url. For example:

//www.youtube.com/embed/jfKfPfyJRdk

If I complete the URL with the https:, then it embeds correctly

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jfKfPfyJRdk

Now, I've only found this issue on a couple of videos in completely different courses. These videos date a few years back, they've been used for years for institution-related topics. I'm not sure if it was a mistake from when they were first embedded or some change Canvas made at some point in the past (wouldn't be the first time I see Canvas make adjustments to src and href URLs) but they've worked for years without issue. I don't see how suddenly deleting any traces of them is a good idea.

@ElijahDow Indeed, importing the pages again doesn't work because Canvas is stripping the video automatically. You have to look for your missing videos directly in the exported file you already have:

Take the .imscc file and unzip it. No need to change the file extension, just unzip it with 7zip or Winrar.
Then you'll need a code editor like Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code
Use the "Find in files" search feature in order to select a folder where to look for a keyword: either "youtube" or "be.com" (for all youtube links) or a specific word or line from the page that can point you to the .html file of the page where your youtube links are missing from.

Let me know if you need more details.

CarolParedes_1

All of our iframe tags have had the video links (src="") stripped from them in all of our courses. The issue happened on 6/3 when Canvas ran their last update. Every course we have dating back to 2019 has had all the tags removed. This links were all https links. They were all Vimeo videos. Echo360 videos were not stripped. We have no resolution to this issue at this time.

ElijahDow

Thank you for that! I'll keep that in mind if we hear that this has happened to more folks. In this particular case, we were able to see all the videos just fine in the Canvas app - so I went through each page to pull the links and piled them into a document organized by modules so students could access it without relying on the app. Very rare win for the Canvas app here.

peter_wiarda

We are investigating the same issue. Some, but not all embedded Youtube videos are affected. Still trying to determine which ones and why.

Can anyone clarify what actions lead to the iframe "src" disappearing? We have a course where the embedded Youtube videos are still on the page and still play, but upon editing the page, the "src" attribute is stripped from the <iframe>s. If saved from this state, the videos are lost. Are any of you having the iframe src disappear from pages that have not been edited recently, or is it only when edits are made that this happens?

Nancy_Webb_CCSF

Our Spring term just ended, but Summer starts on Monday, and we have a lot of courses with now useless pages missing the youtube videos. I understand it was a security measure, but what to do? What if there wasn't a recent course export? For one of the affected courses there was, and I can see those URLS. I copied and pasted one adding the https and now the page works, but will definitely need something to edit all at once, way too many to do one at a time. Has anybody contacted support about this, have a case number?

Proably older embeds removed the https from the youtube URL, but newer embeds kept it. This is a real problem for some courses that rely heavily on external videos, where the instructor hasn't yet moved them to Studio - we do have Studio but many schools don't.

Chris

-Chris

Nancy_Webb_CCSF

Excellent suggestion @Chris - contact support. I did and they said L2 is aware and working on it. The more people who report, the higher it will be on the list to fix. Just discovered by looking at a page's source code that the URL is still there! It's hidden but visible in the HTML. They should be able to bring it back, and they should add the https: fix themselves, so easy to do if they are already manipulating the code. Please support, help our teachers who are so upset with courses that no longer work for students.

CarolParedes_1

All of our iframe src references have been stripped from all of our Canvas courses dating back to 2019. These are not newly edited courses. Here is what I found in my search for answers - If thousands of videos lost their src (hyperlink) attributes simultaneously on June 3rd, you are dealing with a platform-wide regression. Instructure's global deployment introduces structural changes or HTML sanitizer updates. If any illegal attributes are found—like legacy Vimeo code containing <script>, custom div wrappers, or unsupported iframe flags, the new sanitizer aggressively strips the src out entirely on page load or save. Canvas states they are working on the fix.

BrittBright

I just had an instructor reach out for this same issue. I found that running the YouTube content migration tool fixes the issue! Replying to you as you have a loud voice in the community :)

TimMontgomery

Having the same issue, replaced all the broken embed YouTube code on Fri only to see they've all disappeared again today. In contact with Canvas helpdesk but no solution yet

AnnPoll_7259594

Hello- glad to see your post. All of my embedded YouTube videos are also gone and all of the links have been erased in the HTML code. I figured this out Thursday but was unable to log in here all weekend. This is true for every canvas course I have made in the last 6 years.

james_whalley

@BrittBright Is that a feature related to Canvas Studio (now only available to new customers through Canvas Plus/Next)?

james_whalley

We've got instances of YouTube working fine and some where videos are now missing. Adding new videos by using the embed code I get when right-clicking a video on YouTube seems to be stable.

shobha

I was able to view the youtube links by following Gemini's advice:

james_whalley

This is working for me so far too! Thankfully I am just manually fixing 8 courses right now.

shobha

Great! I put all the html files on claude and asked it to give me a canvas-suitable html file with just the topic and the youtube url.

abrgomez

It seems the videos are working now, all previously-missing videos appear to be restored! Anyone else can confirm?

m_pattiruhu

I'm a bit hesitant to say that all my videos are working again, but the videos I checked all work again! 🎉

james_whalley

Same.

dbrace

@james_whalley, I believe @BrittBright is referring to https://community.instructure.com/en/kb/articles/660492-how-do-i-migrate-embedded-youtube-videos-in-canvas-to-studio-content-for-distraction-free-viewing.

-Doug

LNSiefert

Just adding for more info — I have one instructor that lost his embedded ScreenPal videos. We have the ScreenPal LTI 1.3 "Deep Link" to embed ScreenPal videos or ScreenPal video quizzes. He also lost the SRC element in his html as well.

tmalone1

…Also, watch the ticket and make sure it doesn't get sent to the "field admin" (campus admin), we can't fix this problem. This should be an L2 issue. Escalate it if you have to.

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