Embedding Videos without Plugins Hidden Feature of WP?

Which blogger does not want to use YouTube videos in their blog?

Even if you are not a video blog owner like myself, there must be at least once or twice you will have to embed a video.

I remember when I used WordPress almost two years ago, I could not add video to post easily without a video plugin.

What I had to do was either I had to go to the video’s site, looked for “embed” button, copied and pasted the entire code into my post. (related: validated w3c youtube codes)

The second way was of course install and use a plugin. Simple, faster but to be honest it is not my preferred one! I am not a fan of having “too much” plugins..

Why did I have to do those things above to embed YouTube video to my post?

That’s because previously, whenever I copy and paste the video page’s URL, it was automatically converted as a hyperlink in wordpress, and not the video.

Now recently, I can say you can disable your YouTube video plugin, as whenever you copy and paste the video’s URL (only when you use http!) into your blog post, it will be displayed automatically as a video, very cool!

Just to keep in mind, don’t forget to use “http” otherwise it won’t work.

So example, the URL of the video is www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVxjJzJEsks you have to add “http”, to be, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVxjJzJEsks

This does work not only with YouTube videos, but also with Vimeo videos I have checked.

In the backend, it won’t show the video, but if you preview your post or publish it, the videos will show up.

Screenshot:

Not only that, it will also display the exact same video’s dimension or size from the original.

Which means it will save you time from figuring the size embedding’s code.

Honestly, I really love it but I wish the code would be W3C validated.

However I wonder why I didn’t know it after years using wordpress, indeed, there are a lot of flexibities with this blogging software!