Use oEmbed in List Items

Question

I'm aware that WordPress has oEmbed functionality. But the content to be embedded has to be on it's own line like so:

Lorem Ipsum

http://www.youtube.com/link/to/content

More Lorem Ipsum

Unfortunately, my markup looks like this so oEmbed doesn't work and I have to use a plugin.

<ul>
    <li>http://www.youtube.com/link/to/content</li>
    <li>http://www.youtube.com/link/to/content</li>
</ul>

Is there anyway I can get oEmbed to work without this plugin? A line or two in functions.php would be better than this plugin.