How to embed YouTube videos in your WordPress blog with the Extreme Video plugin
To use this tutorial, you should already have the Extreme Video Plugin installed and configured. If you haven’t made it that far, see my earlier tutorial about installing the Extreme Video plugin and embedding Google videos. It contains all the instructions you need, and links to where you can download the plugin.
Instructions
A printer-friendly copy of these instructions is available with images and without.
1. Go to YouTube and find a video you want to embed. Again, I will be a brazen self-promoting hussy and use one of my own videos, from my band Stream of Passion ;-p
2. All of the code we need is inside the “URL” field, see the pink circle below:
Copy and paste the code from this field into a text document so you have it for reference. You’ll end up with something like this (The part you need is highlighted in red):
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnSnXSbmvVg
4. Now you just copy the important red part into the Extreme video tag in your WordPress blog post. Go to your WordPress dashboard and create a new post.
The basic format for embedding videos in your posts looks like this:
[gv data="data string"
width="width in pixels" height="height in pixels"][/gv]
Unfortunately, the height and width tags don’t seem to work very well for YouTube videos. The controls disappear, and the video alignment gets shifted to the bottom right corner. So you can just leave them out and the player will default to its usual size. Thus, for our example video, you’d type something like this:
[gv data="cnSnXSbmvVg"][/gv]
Publish your post and enjoy your video!
5. Changing the size
As noted above, I’ve not figured out how to adjust the size of YouTube videos. If someone knows a simple way to do this, please let me know! (And please post in the comments on the plugin author’s site).
That’s it! Enjoy embedding your videos. Feel free to get in touch with your comments and questions about the instructions here. Note that I can’t answer general questions about the plugin itself; for that you’ll need to contact the plugin author.
And make sure to visit the plugin author’s site and let him know how much you appreciate his work!
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tnx teacher;)
Gwen
I mean it you know, tnx for all you explain, it really helps.
Gwen
Awww, thanks Gwen! There’s a lot of stuff I figure out in the course of a day, so I figured that if I just document it maybe I can save other people the trouble.
hey, i was browsing about the sizing problem and found that setting the width to 450 and the height to 356, i.e. [gv data="..." width="450" height="356"][/gv], then the video will be in full with the navigation bar.
You can also edit [wordpress dir]/wp-content/plugins/wp-ExtremeVideo.php by replacing the default sizes for the youtube videos defined in the function gv_returnYTObject with the values above.
There’s a slight error in the second example, where the closing tag is missing the “/”. I noticed because I’m implementing WordPress as we speak …
Thanks for this one, it’s been a lot of help.
What would I do without alert readers? Thanks, Kristof. This was hard because I had to use the html character entities. I was befuddled by all the ampersands, hashes and semicolons!
Congrats on going with WordPress. You’ll be glad you did. BTW, I don’t actually use this plugin because I found that it made for really slow loading times. It pulls stuff from remote sites every time a page loads, no matter if you have a video embedded or not. So I just drop in the code from Youtube now. It works fine, but I can’t remember if it validates or not. But then again, I’m not a validation nazi. As long as stuff works, it’s fine with me.
Ungha
I didn’t know you could do that. Hmmm … Upon converting from Blogger to WP, it actually sorta coded the youtube links so I figured WP didn’t know what to do with them.
Here’s to me not even trying! *kabam*