I'm a huge fan of YouTube and find funny videos there all the time. I email links to my friends, sure, but sometimes I want to actually embed the videos themselves on my blog. Is there some way to do that? Used to be it was pretty easy to figure out...
Dave's Answer:
YouTube has indeed gone through some major tweaks to its interface in the recent past that have made some things easier while others have become more subtle and require you to pay close attention to figure out. Perhaps it's their way of channeling us visitors into specific behaviors without getting us upset that other functionality has just vanished?
In any case, yes, you can still embed a YouTube video on your blog, Web page, or what have you. You just need to be a bit geeky to get there...
Before I go further, you do realize that to "embed" a video you actually need to be able to insert a sequence of raw HTML code onto your page, right? Some Web page builders don't have that option and any attempt to include "<" and ">" results in them being converted so that your visitor sees the code, rather than having it interpreted by their Web browser.
Let me take you through the steps and you'll know pretty quickly if your tools support this sort of video embedding or not!
First off, here's a typical video, as shown on YouTube:
Zoom in a bit on the row of buttons under the preview image and you'll see that there's one labelled "Embed":
Click on it and suddenly the HTML code sequence you need to embed this particular video on your page appears:
Hold on, though, because if you scroll down a bit, you'll see that there are some options you can tweak to make the embedded video look and work exactly as you want:
Again, zooming in, the most interesting is that you can specify a desired size:
Here's my odd little "mystery escalator" video embedded here on my blog with the 640x390 size, first, the code I'm using:
<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="640" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HUmHlgHVzG0?rel=0&hd=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
and the video itself:
Yeah, no impending Academy Award for that short, but still, you can see it works!
Btw, if you watch a video on YouTube and there's no "embed" button, it might well be the case you find your way there by looking for the "share" button on the image that appears when the video's finished playing:
Still no "embed", but click on "Share" and...
From this point you can click on "Embed" and take it away!
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I understand that people can also disable the ability to embed a video that they post to YouTube. In which case, obviously, you can't embed it, and can only provide a link.
I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by
buying you a cup of coffee!
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I understand that people can also disable the ability to embed a video that they post to YouTube. In which case, obviously, you can't embed it, and can only provide a link.