Im Not Playing Any More

An ongoing office ''educated conversation'' (read: friendly argument) is about YouTube.  The now ubiquitous service provided by Google that reportedly lost them $470 million last year (2009 - Credit Suisse) but is being used more and more as a free Content Distribution Network for the masses.

Comments

There are two things that always get mentioned about YouTube, and one is comments.  Part of the price of this free video service is it by default allows people to comment upon your video.  Some people will find this a great feature, but for some it's more of a worry.  There are ways you can disable YouTube comments however for the squeamish.

Adverts

Now, as I've already mentioned Google spends a small fortune on running YouTube, not even taking into account the $1.65bn purchase price!  So what, you want a free international platform for delivering your videos with absolutely no hangups? Sorry, they are going to try to make their pennies somewhere and in this case it's by serving context-based adverts atop your video (sometimes)

Geting YouTube videos in your Joomla! articles

For those looking for a free way of getting videos onto their site and don't mind having a little YouTube branding on the videos, there are many simple ways of integrating YouTube videos into your Joomla! web site. Depending on what you are trying to achieve, there is a plug-in, module or component for you.  I'm going to look at some of the most common ways of putting video into your content.

Quick and Simple: Embed Code

Embedding code is provided on all videos, and looks similar to this:

<object width="640" height="385">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Y6a3T6O4SQU?fs=1&amp;hl=en_GB"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Y6a3T6O4SQU?fs=1&amp;hl=en_GB" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385">
</embed></object>

All good you say! But there's a problem.  Try copying that into the editor in Joomla! and it'll clean up the text and stop it from working.  (This happens with many things but it only becomes a problem when trying to copy-and-paste code like this).  There are thankfully there is a solution!

Change your Editor to 'none':  You can go into the User Manager and set your users' editor preference to 'None'.  This will let you edit the articles code without the editor then changing it.  While this is the ''quickest'' - it does require a bit of knowledge of HTML

Some Assembly Required: Plugins

A myriad of plug-ins exist to make your live easier...

• The AllVideos plugin will let you put in the video quickly and simply ( it will look something like this {youtube}Y6a3T6O4SQU|600|450|1{/youtube} )
  
• easiertube: Again very simple and easy to use
  
• JPlayer: Based on the JWPlayer, this is another popular choice.
  
• Most CCKs (such as K2) have methods of embedding the video in their articles
  

Module Players

Plug-ins are ideal if you're wanting to put the videos in the body of the article.  However they are mostly a problem if you want to have the video in a Module instead (as they are typically written as content plug-ins, however if anyone would like to correct me on this I would love to know).  You can use the trick of copying the embed code into a Custom HTML module and doing that, otherwise a quick search on the Joomla! Extension Directory should find you something that will do the trick.

I hope that this will help anyone.  I will come back in a week or so with some more ideas on how to get your live video on Joomla! sites.