Embedding videos
In our October newsletter we offered instructions to add Kaltura videos to your webpages. What about YouTube, Vimeo, and other websites where videos are published? The good news is that adding videos from other services is even simpler.
Using oembed
When embedding a video from YouTube or Vimeo, the website ‘oembed’ feature can be used if the video has captioning:
- Navigate to your video on YouTube or Vimeo
- Copy the web address (URL) of that video
- On your webpage, paste the web address into a text content block, post, or page (note, the web address must be on its own line)
- The web address should automatically turn into a preview of the video
Videos and captions
For proper web accessibility, videos embedded on the website must have captions available. While YouTube and Kaltura can both create captions automatically, these should be reviewed and adjusted for accuracy. For videos hosted on Vimeo, a caption file must be uploaded. These are specially formatted text files that indicate the timing of the captions, and typically have file names that end with .srt.
Third-party videos
If you are not the owner of a video and it is not hosted on an official UMaine, UMM or UMS channel, it is best to link to the video without embedding it.