Blogger.com Help – Lesson 7 – Inserting video into a post

I think it’s less worrying to use your own pictures and video when adding them to blog posts. Why worry about copyright when there is YouTube to grab videos from. If it’s on YouTube and they provide an embed tag for the video, it’s yours to use, right? Absolutely! In this post we’ll take a look at inserting a video into a post on your Blogger.com blog.

Note to new visitors! If you would like to know more about this series or view all available lessons, just follow the appropriate link.

There are many times when you might want to insert a video. Perhaps a video you made on your new camera or even a video from YouTube that you thought was funny and want to share it with others. Whatever the reason, video helps a post come to life, and with the mess of video on YouTube and other sites, there are plenty to choose from.

Adding Video to your Post

Inserting a video into your post is very much the same as inserting a picture, except the part about it actually being a video.

In the video, I am modifying the ‘Do you live cautiously‘ post by including a video that is somewhat on the inspirational side.

I thought I would try my hand at creating a video that explains everything you need to know to include a video in your post. It’s the first one I’ve ever made that includes screen capture and an audio overlay. It was quite time-consuming and I think the next one I ever do will go a little faster.

I first show what you need to do to upload a video that you have on your local system. When you have a video local to your system, you will need to upload it to the Blogger.com servers. Once uploaded, Blogger will then process your video.

The second half of the video will then show you how to embed a video from a service such as YouTube or Viddler by using a provided EMBED tag.

Because this is the first video I’m using to show how to do something on the Blogger.com system, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post. Is it better than the other posts? Does it help you more?


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About Wayne

Wayne John is a web developer in Southern California that shares his 25+ years of programming and web development experience freely and happily to anyone willing to learn. He also loathes speaking in the third person. If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed or get updates in your email.
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14 Responses to Blogger.com Help – Lesson 7 – Inserting video into a post

  1. Wayne says:

    Deepak, I’m glad you found it useful. Unfortunately, I don’t have any banners of my own. I’m not graphically inclined, and also very picky about what I think looks good, so I never make them.

  2. Deepak says:

    This post was very useful for me and i will post a video in my blog post.And i have a blog i wanted to place a banner in my blog in exchange of my link.If you are interested.Thank you.

  3. Wayne says:

    Not a problem Fred, you got stuck on the wait prompt I bet. The one big difference that comes to mind is that if you upload to YouTube, you can easily embed that video anywhere else you want to. If you just upload to Blogger within a post, then you can’t really transfer it anywhere else (unless the Blogger and YouTube connection provide a method to do that, which I’m unsure of right now.)

    I would suspect, and of course you’d need to test to see if there are differences, that uploading to YouTube first is going to give you more flexibility with the video itself than just uploading to Blogger in a post.

    Any video I’ve ever uploaded to Blogger has been explicitly for the post itself, and never much more than that.

  4. Fred says:

    Thanks, this is a helpful post. I still have an unanswered question, though: What are the pros and cons of uploading videos into Blogger directly vs. uploading them into your own YouTube channel and then embedding that into your Blogger post? Especially since they’re both Google properties?

  5. Blogger.com Help – Lesson 7 – Inserting video into a post is easy once you know how to do it. The first time for most things are the most challenging or time consuming. I agree with Demeur, Wayne, you have a great instructional voice. I think videos are the way to go for instructional or teaching posts because the viewer and learner can replay and watch the video as many times as they want… see and hear the action steps.

  6. Leslie says:

    me to gary

  7. Wayne says:

    @Demeur – Thanks a bunch! I’ve been trying to determine if videos are the way to go for these instructional posts. To me, I would prefer a video, but other times, I like having the text to read. Doing both for each post would probably make me want to quit blogging altogether..lol. Not really perhaps.

    I’m thinking forward to the templates…I think they might be easier to express and relay the information people need/want in a video as opposed to text.

    Thoughts everyone?

    (I knew you wouldn’t let Gary get off so easily…hahaha)

  8. Demeur says:

    Great post Wayne answers a lot of questions and why I couldn’t post vids the way I tried. I must say you have a great voice for instructional materials.
    Gary quit being so cheap and flip for the DSL you know you want to :-)

  9. Wayne says:

    @Adam – Good point there. I usually try to provide enough space between those objects so that text flows between them and I don’t get any of my objects pushing each other into areas they don’t need to be. Too many objects in a small space just doesn’t work sometimes.

    I haven’t played with (modified) the embed tags from YouTube that much, but there are width and height properties. Perhaps modifying them would help?

    I’m currently debating between Viddler and YouTube for my video hosting, as well as Picassa and Flickr for my photos. I’m using both right now to help me reach a decision on that. Unfortunately, the French company I found for hosting my pics just won’t do anymore.

  10. Adam says:

    One problem I have had with embedding the videos is it has occasionally broken my template. With Viddler you can always alter the width of the player to make it fit. I am not sure if you can do that with Youtube. Another problem I had was when I put a photo in the same post it did all sorts of wonky things. I just learned to make sure that if I put a pic and video in a post, I need to separate them with some text which seemed to make them display fine.

  11. Wayne says:

    @Gary – Yeah, that’s what I’ll do sometimes when the video is just not streaming well. Even with DSL, you still sometimes have a video that doesn’t play nice with you, but for the most part, they just hum right along.

  12. —well see I learn something new everytime I talk with ya—I didn’t know one could hit pause and that the vid would continue to buffer up——.

    Gary (aka old dude)

  13. Wayne says:

    Well Gary, DSL is just a bigger pipe out. You have dial-up, consider that an 1″ copper pipe, and you can only send so much water through. With a bigger pipe (DSL) say an 8″ round, you can fit that much more water through your pipe.

    You can do it, watch the videos, you just need to wait for them to queue up. If the continually stop and buffer, hit pause for a while and allow it to collect up data without watching the video at the same time. Grab a cupcake and wait, or get some of that there cable or DSL. Either way, you can still watch the vids. One just takes longer.

    It’s a better experience for sure Gary. If you can flip for it, I’d say do it.

    I’ll leave some for Demeur to ring in on. lol

  14. Wayne, wow am I impressed with your knowledge of blogging and what ya can and can’t do. I don’t have highspeed, or dsl here, so unable to spend the two hours plus that it would take to download your instructional video—but I am sure it was concise and understandable to those who could do so. The video on you “test blog” was inspirational—-took me an hour to download that one.

    —Does a person have to have DSL to put video in their blog? (like if a person was mad enough to take the time not having DSL, could he do it?”

    Gary (aka old dude)
    http://threescoreplusten.blogspot.com/

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