Highly experimental: YouTube videos!

[emk]

rdearman mentioned YouTube support, and I couldn't resist. I've always wanted to fill my log with French music and the opening credits of French series.

So as part of the "highly experimental extensions" series, let's try out some YouTube videos and see if this works. Here's a classic featuring several polyglots from this very forum:



To insert a video, you write:

Code: Select all

[youtube]6HZbBLl4FA0[/youtube]

…where "6HZbBLl4FA0" is the code from the YouTube video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HZbBLl4FA0

The usual disclaimers apply: This is all ridiculously experimental, and it may go away without warning. And please refrain from rick-rolling, etc .

[sctroyenne]

rdearman mentioned YouTube support, and I couldn't resist.

Here's a classic featuring several polyglots from this very forum:



To insert a video, you write:

Code: Select all

[youtube]6HZbBLl4FA0[/youtube]

…where "6HZbBLl4FA0" is the code from the YouTube video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HZbBLl4FA0

The usual disclaimers apply: This is all ridiculously experimental, and it may go away without warning. And please refrain from rick-rolling, etc .

Nice! I'll have to edit my posts.

As for rick-rolling, I think when I get some spare time I'll look for foreign language covers of "Never Gonna Give You Up".

[Woodsei]

This is wonderful! Seeing as to how many Youtube links I always post over at HTLAL. emk, maybe also a feature for Lang-8? It could be super useful for challenges like the output challenge, or individual team challenges, or simply anyone who wants to share their writing with the HTLAL community. I guess I should add Soundcloud, too, but I don't use it much, myself

And btw, HTLAL's placeholder is back up again, after I was fnally able to access the site. T_T

[sctroyenne]

Works great!



(Did this on mobile BTW )

[numerodix]

Sweeeet! I actually *have* youtube videos even

[garyb]

Great idea, as long as it's used sensibly! I've been on some forums where people post lots of videos per page, like on threads about music, which can kill browser performance.

[emk]

Great idea, as long as it's used sensibly! I've been on some forums where people post lots of videos per page, like on threads about music, which can kill browser performance.

This is a really good observation, and thank you for raising it. I'd hate to lose video entirely—it seems really nice for logs—but the concern about over load times is really important, and I imagine that it's a huge deal on mobile.

Could we address this via social conventions? Or would it be worth trying to look for some sort of technical solution that would show a few videos per page, and perhaps replace the others with "click here to load video"? I think I could slip the latter through phpBB's BBcode editor with a bit of tweaking and maybe an extension that loaded some custom JavaScript to control video display.

[tastyonions]

My personal convention is to make the content of my posts totally transparent to a simple text-based copy and paste operation. That is, I rarely post images or videos, and if I post a link, I make the visible text the same as the URL of the site being linked.

For example: [url=http://www.site.com/]http://www.site.com/[/url]

But that is just me being kind of a weirdo.

[Hrhenry]

I just tried viewing one of these YouTube videos on a tablet.

I'm happy to report that it works nicely (and differently than on other forums). At least under android/Chrome, instead of playing the video within the page itself as on other forums, it'll launch the YouTube app, which seems to cut down on resource usage.

I have a feeling they'll play in the browser on a desktop, though.

R.
==

[AlexTG]

It would be nice to have a "Display videos within posts: y/n" setting in the control panel the same as there's a "Display images within posts: y/n" setting. That way each user could decide for themselves whether they prefer to see links to videos or have them embedded.