[bug] Twitter video embeds breaking: 403 error

Laserbomb

On the desktop discord client, for the past few months Twitter video embeds have had probably a 90% chance of not actually working, and instead displaying the "The media could not be displayed" message. The videos work fine when I click the twitter link and follow it to the twitter site in Firefox.

 

I opened the discord developer console and found a "GET https://api.twitter.com/1.1/videos/tweet/config/1277648022785134592.json 403" error, followed by four "invalid style with ID ####" warnings.

 

Prior to this issue, all twitter videos worked fine, I think this may have started happening roughly around the time when multi-image embeds were implemented, but unsure. I mentioned this error to someone else and he said he had the same playback issue, but he was able to watch an embed that I wasn't, so it doesn't seem to affect specific videos. If useful, the specific tweet in question is https://twitter.com/NintendoAmerica/status/1277648022785134592?s=19 although this happens on virtually any tweet with a video embed.

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Comments

2 comments

Date Votes
  • devviedehm

    Same for me, and quite a few other people. Though for some it could be something with their settings, this is a bug that really needs to be addressed. I don't know if this needs to be solved through Discord's side, or on Twitter's side, but it would be good if the developers took a look at it and managed to give an answer of if/when it will be fixed, or what we can expect.

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  • Aimee

    It's only been a year, I'm sure Discord would get around to this eventually /s

    Here's my findings:

    There was a similar issue in the past: https://bugs.discord.com/T2657

    It was marked as "wontfix" even though it was really "cantfix" because "it's an issue on twitter's end". Right.

    Eventually twitter got smart and actually 'fixed' the issue. But to nobody's surprise, they still managed to mess it up in some circumstances:

    Content will fail to play with "The media could not be displayed" / "353 - This request requires a matching csrf cookie and header.":

    • You are logged into twitter at the time.
    • You are allowing third party cookies.
    • The cookie included in the header includes the "auth_token" key.

    So for end-users there's two simple 'solutions':

    • Log out of twitter. Might not be an option if you use twitter actively next to Discord.
    • Disable third party cookies in the browser. Unfortunately browsers don't offer a per site toggle for third party cookies, so if you find third party cookies useful on other sites this may also not be an option.

    The third solution is to modify the cookie for specific requests from specific sites. There may be some browser add-on / extension that can do this, I haven't looked into that and would be hesitant to recommend one anyway given the level of access and control required to do this.

    Note that the above is just from what I've experienced. There may be other reasons for videos in twitter auto-embeds failing.

    As another alternative, there's a third party solution called TwitFix (common usage uses third party domain, unless you want to run it on your own server; privacy implications apply) that works well; but would only be a possible solution if you have control over what's linking to tweets in the first place.. fx you're a bot developer and are sending tweet links to channels. It does nothing for twitter video links posted by others.

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