Indymedia Upgraded to Allow Youtube Videos

Monday November 19, 2007 21:29

by 1 of Indymedia Collective - Indymedia

Stories and comments can now include Youtube Video

The Oscailt software that is used to power the Indymedia Ireland web-site has now been upgraded to allow YouTube video to be embedded in both stories and comments. The embedded Youtube video above is an example of how it will look.

Users will now be able to post one YouTube video link per story or comment. The way it works is that a new field called YouTube Id now appears in the Publish Page under the Related Link field. Normally to post or embed a YouTube video on a web-site, you copy the HTML snippet provided by YouTube. For publishing on indymedia.ie, all you need to do is to provide the YouTube ID:

For example in this YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow, the YouTube ID is made up of the characters that follow the v= part of the URL (web address) and in this example is St1-WTc1kow.

The Oscailt software automatically generates the necessary HTML tags to embed the video at the top of the story or comment. During publishing, the preview functionality should display your video as an embedded object at the top of the page. You may have to wait a few seconds for the image to appear as the video takes time to download from the YouTube web-site.

This new feature should help indymedia.ie catch up with the latest developments on the Web as it continually evolves. In the near future, we will be updating the Oscailt software to support similar video files form other on-line distributors of user-generated video.

The existing Editorial Guidelines that are used for text and images will apply to the publishing of embedded video as for stories and comments. Similar to the guidelines for Other Press (relating to stories and media that are published elsewhere on the web), embedded video should be accompanied with a summary or description of the video and its context.