Players From Video Sharing Sites - YouTube
YouTube's Basic Player
As it turns out, you don’t have to create, buy or install your own player applications, instead you can borrow one provided for free by any of the many popular video sharing sites. It’s called “embedding.”
Embedding is just a fancy term meaning to “build in” the video player into your site - so the video plays without using a pop-up window, all the controls for the video are “built into” your Web page.
The only caveat is that you first have to upload your video to their site, once there it’s simply a matter of copying and pasting a snippet of their embed code into your Web page and, viola!, your site visitors can now enjoy the video from your site using their player.
The other very nice feature about this technique is that the video file itself remains on the video sharing site’s servers so there’s no extra bandwidth costs to you make the video playable on your site. (There are quite a few sites that provide totally free file hosting so you can still enjoy bandwidth-cost-free video sharing even if you don’t elect to use a player from a video sharing site.)
Which sites provide the best media player to use on your site? Largely it’s a matter of personal taste but let’s take a look at a few of the most popular choices, starting with:
YOUTUBE
Obviously YouTube is the most visited video sharing site on the Internet but its popularity has little to do with its player which, in my estimation, is pretty basic.
I have never liked the white “play” arrow pasted over the middle of the video image. I assume YouTube’s did some research and found that some people were confused about which button to push to get the video to begin playing and they came up with this compromise…yech!
With the basic player, you are provided with an elapsed time counter, volume control, and a full screen button. The time counter is nice because it tells you at a glance not only how long the video is but how far into it you are at any point.
One more point to consider - since Google recently purchased YouTube is there a possibility your site will have higher search engine rankings at least for that page if you use the YouTube video player as opposed to some other solution? Google ranking is all magic, who knows - my firm definitive thought on this is “maybe, but not really likely - however I could be wrong either way.”
More advanced users can actually create for themselves a “custom” player which means you can choose a different color scheme, select from 2 different layouts and a jukebox function that allows you to create a playlist of other YouTube videos that the player will also be capable of playing once embedded into your site.
So, all in all, is the YouTube embedded video player good enough? If you are not too particular and are just looking for basic, quick and dirty functionality, then the YouTube player should fit your needs. Personally, I am more impressed with some of the other options out there which we will explore in upcoming posts.
Tags: video player, youtube