How to Embed a Youtube Video Cleanly to Your Blog

The video above shows you how to embed Youtube videos to your blog effectively and cleanly. Specifically, what we will be doing is resizing the video to fit into our blog nicely, making the play bar hide itself, removing the distracting information at the top left corner of the embedded video, and removing the related videos at the end. The process is very simple, using only a few modifications.

The final code that you will be using should look something like this:

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rWl4y1-rdMw?rel=0;3&amp;autohide=1&amp;showinfo=0" frameborder="0" width="635" height="353"></iframe>

*Note: The Youtube URL, Width, and Height will vary.

The part that needs to be added to the URL after the “rel=0” part is this:

;3&amp;autohide=1&amp;showinfo=0

Youtube will automatically give you all of the code that you need for the size and showing the related videos, so we only need to worry about the part listed above for the coding part. Just paste this after the “rel=0” section.

The end result will be similar to the way the video on this page looks. The dimensions of the video fit nicely into the blog post, and there will be a simple poster frame and play button instead of displaying the video info and the play bar at the bottom. There is also no border around the frame. When the video plays, you will notice that the play bar will hide itself as you hover away, but if you hover over the video you can still change the resolution, make the video fullscreen, enable captioning, etc. When the video is paused, the video title and information are not displayed. At the end of the video, the related videos are not displayed. This keeps the focus on your blog, and prevents something coming up that you may not want to associate with your blog. It appears that the newest form of embedded Youtube videos no longer have the Youtube logo in the corner of the video anymore, so we don’t have to worry trying to remove the Youtube logo.

Thankfully, the days of the not being able to edit the way your embedded Youtube videos look are apparently gone. For those who want to further customize their embedded videos, Google has a list of several other Youtube Embedded Player Parameters.

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WordPress 2.9 video- and embedding video

Need a quick introduction to the new features in WordPress 2.9- watch the video:

For the first time, I didn’t need to use viper007bond Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin to post this, since embedding is covered for a number of video sites. However- it’s still not as easy peasy as they say- I had to switch to HTML view to paste the “embed” code- to get it to work. The little filmstrip button which is supposed to “embed” media- still asks for the user to figure out what type of file they are embedding.

Somehow, even with Automattic (the publishers of WordPress) having a UX person on staff- the user interface is still more complex than it needs to be. I’m still looking at the four “Upload/Insert” buttons- and wondering why they need four buttons for the same controls (I thought I’d written a post about this- but, couldn’t find it).

Other cool features are the ability to crop and rotate images, update and compatibility check all plugins, and a few other cool little fixes. We’ve installed it on our sites- without problem so far (5 days). We’ll report any changes on that as we find them.

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