What's the best way to get the embedded objects of a post?

Hallo,

I need to get the embeded objects for a couple of posts, because I want to display some of them at the front page.

How to do this has already been asked here in this forum. In that post it was suggested to use $post->post_content and to search for <video> (in my case: <iframe> using preg_match_all.

An alternative solution would be to use raw SQL like in the following function:

function get_embeds ($post_id) {
	global $wpdb;
	$prefix = $wpdb->get_blog_prefix(BLOG_ID_CURRENT_SITE);
	$sql_statement = "
		SELECT meta_value
		FROM " . $prefix . "postmeta
		WHERE post_id = " . $post_id . "
		AND meta_key LIKE '_oembed%'
		";
	return $wpdb->get_col($sql_statement);
}

Which way is cleaner?

Philipp