A core update was made over the weekend that will allow you to embed videos from sites like YouTube, Google Video, even Myspace, and quite a few others into posts and pages on your site. When you add them they should something like this:

(poor Pavelec…)

Anyway… When adding/editing a post or page you should notice a few new buttons on the toolbar:

Buttons on your toolbar to embed video in your post or page

Clicking on one of those buttons will bring up a dialog box like this one:

This one is for YouTube, but they’re all pretty similar… You just need to have the URL of the video you want to put on the page and paste that in the box. Note that it must be the FULL link, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szwjh4ogCkM in order for it to work. You can set the dimensions if needed or just leave the default.

This is different from “uploading” a video to your site in that the file you’re embedding stays on YouTube/Google/whatever and does not actually get copied to your site.

A few other things:

1. The person viewing your site must have Flash installed… so currently that will leave out most mobile devices.
2. Your site must have a certain core file reference in place. So if you embed a file and it only shows you an image but not the full file then you’ll need to let me know so that I can update your site files.
3. Please remember that you are embedding files from OTHER sites. So if they don’t look good, are slow to download, look grainy… whatever… it is the site that you are embedding FROM, not your site, that is causing an issue.

Have fun!

Edit: For those of you who aren’t aware, my friends and I are Thrashers fans. The clip above shows “our” rookie goalie, Ondrej Pavelec, basically falling apart during a recent game against the Capitals. Not a good day for an otherwise spectacular player. That being said… Here is another clip from a game just over a week after the one above…