Video is everywhere on the web. There are a number of video sharing sites that allow you to upload video and share with the rest of the world. The most popular of these sites include YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo, of which YouTube is by far the most visited.
WordPress has a number of facilities that allow you to incorporate video into your site but it really makes sense to upload your video to a sharing site then embed the video into your site.
There are many advantages in using YouTube to host your video. For one thing, it has huge search engine magnetism. You can search from within or from outside YouTube and if you’ve described your video well, you should get found. Another benefit is that it converts many video formats into the most popular format on the web… namely ‘Flash’. When you take a video, whether it’s from your cam-corder, digital camera or smart phone, it will save the video in a particular format. That might be an .AVI file or an MP4 but when you upload to YouTube (and the upload process is very simple) it converts to ‘Flash’.
Once uploaded, your video can be shared with the millions of people who visit every day. But a feature that you may not be aware of is that once uploaded, your video (and pretty much any other video on YouTube) can be embedded directly into your website. And it’s fully legal.
Let’s visit www.youtube.com and search for a video that’s already online. Dilbert is a popular ‘strip cartoon’ that parodies the workplace so once on YouTube, search for ‘Dilbert Internet’.
You’ll see an amusing ‘video’ which you might like to share.
There are 2 ways to embed a video from YouTube into a WordPress Page or Post.
The first involves copying the ‘embedded’ code; which we’ll describe first so you’ll see how the process works.
Most of the video sharing sites have an ‘embed’ option to embed the code of the video onto another site. With YouTube, this is on the right of the video itself.
The code will look like this…
<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/JoU9GrgEyhw&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;”&gt;&lt;/param&gt;&lt;param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/JoU9GrgEyhw&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
You’ll see that the code includes the size of the video; which can be adjusted for the area you wish to place the video. Changing the width and height adjusts the size of the video displayed.
So, copy that piece of code and head back to your WordPress Dashboard.
In Article 1, we created a Page called Philosophy… so let’s edit that page now.
You’ll see that you have 2 tabs on the top of each page… First tab is labeled ‘Visual’ and second tab is ‘HTML’. We want to paste the code we copied from YouTube into the HTML tab.
Once open, scroll down to the bottom of the HTML page and paste the code in. Now click onto the Visual tab and you’ll see that a video placeholder shows where the video will display and the size of the video. Click on Update (or Publish if you are creating this page now).
Check out the page live and you’ll see the video you just viewed on YouTube, live in your page. It’s actually still be hosted and played on YouTube but displayed through your WordPress page.
The second way to embed that video into your WordPress Page or Post is simpler but actually does the exact same thing.
Go back to the YouTube page and you’ll see above where you grabbed the Embedded Code, there is an option to copy the URL (or address of the video). Click in the text box that displays the URL, highlight the text and copy it. It will look something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoU9GrgEyhw.
Now go back to your WordPress Dashboard and create a new Page or Post. On the second line of the icon bars, you’ll see a button showing a strip of film. This is the ‘insert/edit embedded media’ button. Click the button and a popup window will appear.
From the popup window:
- Type = Flash
- File/URL (Paste URL that you copied from YouTube)
Dimensions should automatically appear although you can manually adjust them. The ‘constrain proportions’ check box will keep the aspect ratio of the video intact should you wish to resize the video. Change either Height or Width of the video and the other will adjust automatically.
You’ll know it works when you see a preview of the video in the popup window.
Click the ‘Insert’ button and it’ll appear in your Page or Post.
It really is simple to create a video to introduce your business or to just upload a family video. YouTube makes it easy to upload and share, and WordPress makes it easy to include directly into your website and blog.
Videos can also be displayed in the side bars on your WordPress site by embedding the code into Text Widgets. Widgets are the subject of my next article.
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