EmbedPlus is a great enhancement to embedding YouTube videos. It adds features like chaptering, Digg, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit reactions, time-synced annotations, looping, zoom, and slow-motion playback. With a simple wizard, you can customize a YouTube video to begin and end where you want it to and incorporate the added features that EmbedPlus provides.
You can head over to www.EmbedPlus.com to run through the wizard and it will generate the HTML code you can paste into just about anything that accepts HTML. For WordPress and phpBB, there are specialized ways of adding the needed code to a site.
WordPress
WordPress has a very elegant solution from EmbedPlus in the form of an official WordPress plugin for self-hosted sites. Upon activating the plugin, a new button will appear on the toolbar of your post editor. You can click the button to start the wizard to configure a video to your specifications.
phpBB
It’s been a little while since we last talked about bbcodes in phpBB. Generally, I’ve been pretty satisfied with what I have and don’t want to make things too complicated or fill the screen with phpBB buttons. The added functionality of EmbedPlus makes me consider using it to replace the YouTube button I already have in place.
BBCodes are useful but somewhat limited. Since there are multiple variables available to supplement the wizard, I limited my configuration to include which video, when it starts, one comment, and when that comment appears.
The bbcode appears below.
[youtube3]{TEXT1},{TEXT2},{TEXT3},{TEXT4}[/youtube3]
TEXT1 = YouTube video ID
TEXT2 = Start at x seconds
TEXT3 = Comment1
TEXT4 = Comment1 appears at x seconds
If you don’t have a comment or starting point, you can just insert nothing but include the commas.
For a basic embed that still gets slow motion, replay, and zoom, it would be [youtube3]4-Mw8PSw2cE,,,[/youtube3]
Your HTML replacement for the bbcode would be as follow, though you could tweak yours further to use more or less of the features EmbedPlus provides.
[html]<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="430" height="332" data="http://getembedplus.com/embedplus.swf" id="ep9410">
<param value="http://getembedplus.com/embedplus.swf" name="movie" />
<param value="high" name="quality" />
<param value="transparent" name="wmode" />
<param value="always" name="allowscriptaccess" />
<param value="true" name="allowFullScreen" />
<param name="flashvars" value="ytid={TEXT1}&width=430&height=300&start={TEXT2}&stop=&hd=0&react=0&chapters=¬es={TEXT4}%7e{TEXT3}" />
<iframe class="cantembedplus" title="YouTube video player" width="430" height="300" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/{TEXT1}?&start={TEXT2}" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</object>
<!–[if lte IE 6]> <style type="text/css">.cantembedplus{display:none;}</style><![endif]–>[/html]
The features EmbedPlus provides improves YouTube’s standard embedding and being able to use it in various other platforms is also very handy.