Unable to interface with external media API

Using the Media Module, users who attempt to add an External Media Item and receive the error 'Unable to interface with external media API' means one of 2 things:

• 'allow_url_fopen' is set to a value which equates to false within in PHP configuration.
• The needed remote file can not currently be loaded.

Enabling 'allow_url_fopen'

Editing 'php.ini'

Having access to the main 'php.ini' configuration file means you can directly edit it and change the above directive. Locate your 'php.ini' file (on Ubuntu this will be '/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini' if using the default PHP and Apache2 packages) and locate the following lines:

; Whether to allow the treatment of URLs (like http:// or ftp://) as files.
allow_url_fopen = Off

Change the value 'Off' to 'On' for 'allow_url_fopen', once done, restart your web server for the changes to take effect. If using Apache2 (again on Ubuntu) you should be able to use the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart