Wordpress Embedded Video Issue

Question

I am having difficulty with a Wordpress site that has already been pretty heavily customized. Suddenly, one of the pages simply stopped working!

The issue is that when clicking a video link, a lightbox clone (prettyPhoto) is supposed to show the youtube video, but instead the popup message "Image cannot be loaded. Make sure the path is correct and image exist." displays.

Here is what I have learned so far on the issue through a lot of research and exploring the code:

• The page is composed of individual posts and the images that the anchor tag is surrounding are generated using the video thumbnail of each post.

• The posts themselves are merely a YouTube link "ex: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOKJ7cybi4" with a title and a video thumbnail.

• The issue seems to be caused by the href attribute that Wordpress generates. Using the above youtube link example, it supplies a href attribute like this (it actually puts the span tags and everything inside of the href attribute):

  <span class='embed-youtube' style='text-align:center; display: block;'>
      <iframe class='youtube-player' type='text/html' width='640' height='390' src='http://www.youtube.com/embed/LdOKJ7cybi4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent' frameborder='0'></iframe>
  </span>
  

• When I remove the span tags and all contents and replace it with the content of the post (ex: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOKJ7cybi4), then it works! But, I can't figure out how to make it use the YouTube link that was typed into the post, rather than generating these excessive and unneccessary span tags.

Help please!

Answer 1

It seems like wordpress is formatting your text. there are several plugins available to stop this happening for eg :

http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/ps-disable-auto-formatting

However, given that your site is already highly customized I would recommend exercising caution and perhaps backing up first.