Embedded videos support for our blog

Question

'ello friends. :)

Sometimes, I would like to embed a video in a blog post. Sadly, I've been struggling with the Wordpress editor and some other spooky magic tags found in the WP documentation, but I had no luck so far.

A recent post of mine - Our first 100k+ user - had a video accessible via link. IMHO it would look better if embedded in the post itself.

But I do understand that, for obvious reasons, some tags are disallowed.

I believe YouTube might have a better integration with WP, but I was thinking of a broader range of video services, like Vimeo.

^{Disclaimer: I have nothing against YouTube, I just find it too noisy for my taste.}

Another example I can think of is Stefan Kottwitz's keynote on TUG 2011, made available by the awesome guys at River Valley TV.

One idea I've been thinking of (a new blog series) is a revisit of some great keynotes from TeX conferences. For example, I'm sure people would like to watch Frank Mittelbach talking about the LaTeX3 project and even witness the epicness of one of Bruno Le Floch's cakes. :)

I'd like to kindly ask our beloved community for feedback on this suggestion. It would be great to embed videos from several sources.

Answer 1

The easiest way to embed a YouTube or Vimeo video into a WP post is to just copy the HTML code generated by the video's host (available by clicking "Share"). You'll get something like this:

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/43125423" width="500" height="281" 
  frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> 
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/43125423">100k celebration video</a> from 
  <a href="http://vimeo.com/cereda">Paulo Cereda</a> on 
  <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

You can customize a lot of the options (caption, size, behavior) via the Share tool before copying that code, or by editing the code directly if you prefer. Once done, just paste it into your WordPress post (making sure you're in HTML editing mode first!) and the video will show up embedded.

There are various options to make this quicker (for instance, [vimeo <id>] or [youtube <id>] links), but unless you're posting a lot of videos the normal <iframe> embedding should be enough.