remove divs and spans from view output In my page.tpl.php I'm doing this to display one of my view:

print views_embed_view('teaserview', 'default');


That gives me the following html output:

&lt;span thmr="thmr_10"&gt;
&lt;div class="view view-teaserview view-id-teaserview view-display-id-default view-dom-id-e051ba535ce9aac6cd9a0d564b3dbb29 contextual-links-region"&gt;
    &lt;div class="contextual-links-wrapper"&gt;
        &lt;span thmr="thmr_16"&gt;
        &lt;ul class="contextual-links"&gt;
            &lt;li class="views-ui-edit first last"&gt;&lt;span thmr="thmr_17"&gt;&lt;a href="/kbi/admin/structure/views/view/teaserview/edit/default?destination=node/3"&gt;Edit view&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
        &lt;/ul&gt;
        &lt;/span&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
    &lt;div class="view-content"&gt;
        &lt;span thmr="thmr_15"&gt;
        &lt;div class="views-row views-row-1 views-row-odd views-row-first views-row-last"&gt;
            &lt;span thmr="thmr_14"&gt;
            &lt;span thmr="thmr_11"&gt;&lt;span thmr="thmr_12"&gt;&lt;span thmr="thmr_13"&gt;&lt;img src="http://127.0.0.1/kbi/sites/default/files/teaser_2.jpg" width="1029" height="308" alt="" /&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;
        &lt;/div&gt;
        &lt;/span&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/span&gt;


But the only thing that I really need is

&lt;img src="http://127.0.0.1/kbi/sites/default/files/teaser_2.jpg" width="1029" height="308" alt="" /&gt;


Is there a possibility to modify the views_embed_view call so that I get only the needed data? 

There would be the possibility to modify all the views .tpl.php files but I hope there's an easier way to do this. 

I also read about the semantic views module but I didn't understand how to configure my view with it so that i get only the needed markup as output. it didn't seem to have any effect.
If you go into the view thru the Views UI, and look at the fields, you can configure/remove the wrapper html from the field by selecting none for the wrapper of the field, and that should take a lot, if not all, of the html away that you don't want.  Also, if you go into the views admin screen and go to tools, you can check the "Do not show hover links over views" which should remove the first edit portion of all of your views when looked at via an admin type account as well.

If the above doesn't take away all the html you want, you can either modify the templates as you mentioned above, or use something like this instead of views_embed_view:

$view = views_get_view('teaserview');
$display_id = 'default';
$view-&gt;set_display($display_id);
$view-&gt;execute();


which will execute but not display the view ... but will create a $view->result which is an array of row objects basically, so you could then go in there and print out whatever you wanted.

To find out what is in there, throw in a

drupal_set_message('&lt;pre&gt;' . print_r($view-&gt;result, true) . '&lt;/pre&gt;');


and you'll see what you can work with.

PS
Once you have this working, I would put it in a preprocess hook and assign this output to a variable instead of putting any/all of this code in your page.tpl, too...

PPS
I also am assuming you know that the Theme Developer module is throwing a lot of html in there as well (all those thmr='s as such).