Inserting Video Files into Your Blog Posts

Whether you're producing your own videos for publication or embedding other people's videos, placing a video file in a blog post has never been easier with WordPress.

Several video galleries on the Web today allow you to add videos to blog posts — Google's YouTube service (www.youtube.com) is a good example of a third-party video service that allows you to share their videos.

Adding video from the Web

To add video from the Web, click the Add Video icon, then click the From URL tab, shown in Figure 4-1, on the Add Video pop-up window and follow these steps:

Figure 4-1: Add Video from URL.

1. Type the URL (Internet address) of the video in the Video URL text box.

   Type the full URL, including the http:// and www portion of the address. Video providers, such as YouTube, usually list the direct links for the video files on their sites; you can copy and paste one of those links into the Video URL text box.

2. (Optional) Type the title of the video in the Title text box.

   Giving a title to the video allows you to provide a bit of a description of the video. Provide a title if you can so that your readers know what the video is about.

3. Click the Insert into Post button.

   A link to the video is inserted into your post. WordPress doesn't embed the actual video in the post; it inserts only a link to the video. Your blog visitors click the link to load another page in which the video plays.

The preceding steps give you the ability to insert a hyperlink that your readers can click to view the video on another Web site (such as YouTube). However, if you activate WordPress's nifty Auto-Embed feature, WordPress can automatically embed many of these videos within your posts and pages.

With this feature, WordPress automatically detects that a URL you typed in your post is a video (from YouTube, for example) and wraps the correct HTML embed code around that URL to make sure that the video player appears in your post (in a standards, XHTML-compliant way).

Before WordPress can embed a video, however, you must enable the Auto-Embed feature on the Media Settings page by following these steps:

1. Click Media in the Settings drop-down list on your WordPress Dashboard.

   The Media Settings page loads in the Dashboard.

2. Select the Auto-Embed check box.

   The Auto-Embed feature is now enabled and WordPress will attempt to embed a video player from a video URL from third-party video services like YouTube or Flickr within your post.

3. Set the dimensions of the video in which you want the (video) to appear on your site in the Maximum Embed Size field.

   Enter size (width and height) that you want the videos to appear in your posts and pages.

4. Click the Save Changes button.

   You're ready to automatically embed links into your WordPress posts.

Adding video from your computer

To upload and post to your blog a video from your computer, click the Add Video icon on the Edit Post or Add New Post page. Then follow these steps:

1. Click the Choose Files to Upload button.

   An Open dialog box appears.

2. Select the video file that you want to upload and click Open (or simply double-click the filename).

   The file uploader window in WordPress appears, which shows a progress bar while your video uploads. When the upload is complete, a dialog box that contains several options opens.

3. Type a title for the file in the Title text box.
4. Type a caption for the file in the Caption text box.
5. Type a description of the file in the Description text box.
6. Click the File URL button.

   Clicking this button provides a direct link in your post to the video file itself.

7. Click Insert into Post.

   WordPress doesn't embed a video player in the post, it inserts only a link to the video; however, if you have the Auto-Embed feature activated, WordPress attempts to embed the video within a video player. If WordPress cannot embed a video player, it displays the link that your visitors will have to click in order to open the video in a new window to view it.