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How to post a video?

Teng Li's picture

Sometimes a video can be more convenient and effective than words on delivering a message. Now you can embed videos in your post in iMechanica. As a demonstration, I first embed a video below I made previously on how to make hyperlinks in your post. If you're interested in posting a video in iMechanica, read the following instructions:

How to embed a video in your post?
Step 1: Sign up a free account at YouTube.com, a website you can share videos online. Upon sign up, you can upload videos to YouTube. Follow the easy directions there. Of course you may want to read copyright tips of YouTube before uploading.
Step 2: Once uploaded, your video will have a Unique URL. You can always provide a hyperlink of the video in your post. To directly embed the video into a post, you need to use the html code automatically generated by YouTube, which you can easily find below the unique URL in the video information. Copy the entire html code.
Step 3: Since the current setting of the default text editor of iMechanica (those MS-word-type buttons above the textbox, called TinyMCE) does not support video yet, you need to turn it off and just use plain html. To turn off TinyMCE, click "my account" on the left sidebar, then click "edit" tab. Below "Account information" box, find "TinyMCE rich-text settings" and click it to expand the box. In the Default state, it shows "true" (means TinyMCE is on). Click the drop-down list and choose "false" . Scroll down to the bottom and click "Submit". Now TinyMCE is turned off.
Step 4: Start to post a new entry. Now you should see a Body textbox without any buttons. Paste the YouTube html code into the box. You can add any description above or below the code. If you want, you can also use any html editor to prepare your post and copy/paste the entire html file into the box.
Step 5: Preview your post then submit. Now all iMech users can view your video without leaving your post!
Of course, you can always turn TinyMCE back on by repeating Step 3.
We're still improving the video function in iMechanica. If you have any creative ideas to better achieve such a function, welcome to leave your comment below.
Enjoy vlogging in iMech.

 

Comments

Zhigang Suo's picture

Well done, Teng! A number of people have noted possible ways to collect and use movies in mechanics. A while back, Zak Stone pointed out a video on YouTube of a spectacular mechanical phenomenon. Be sure to watch this! You should also turn on the speaker of your computer to listen to the explanations. Phenomena like this remind us why we do mechanics.

Zak also posted an entry in Applied Mechanics News, suggesting that we help school kids produce videos of their own experiments of mechanics, so that iMech can become a platform for outreach. Professional mechanicians can provide advice, and link the experiemnts of the kids to larger pictures and deeper meanings of mechanics. I have once advised Daniel and his classmate on a project, which won a state competition. I wish they videotaped it. Years later, it would be a wonderful reminder of their youthful days, and would also provide ideas for other kids.

In the early days of Applied Mechanics News, Ravi-Chandar suggested that we set up a data and image repository.

iMechanica now has the potential to do all these. Now a few technical questions for Teng (and others with experience with making videos and posting them):

  1. I suppose that as long as people can make a hyperlink to a video posted on Youtube (such as the one pointed out by Zak), it should be fine, right? It is easier than embedding a video into a post, so people can stop at your Step 1.
  2. The resolution of your video is low. Is it a limit set by YouTube, or a limit set by the software that you use to produce the screencast?
  3. Presumably people can post their videos anywhere, and just use iMechanica as a platform for discussion and for alerting the viewers. Is there any technical difficulty to post a video, say, on your own web site?
  4. How did you make the screencast?

So many questions. Please take your time. We'll be doing mechanics all our lives. We can wait. Thank you again for your great work!

Teng Li's picture

Thank you for raising several questions, Zhigang.

Answer to Q1: Yes. The easier solution is that, upload a video to YouTube, then just hyperlink it in your post. But I still recommend to embed the video in your iMech post if possible, for the following reasons: i) it's neat, no need to load extra YouTube background noise; ii) easy to interact among iMech users. People can just post comments below your post. No need to register a YouTube account to comment.

Answer to Q2: The resolution is set by both. You can control the resolution of source video in the screencast software. When a video is uploaded to YouTube, its size and resolution will be automatically reformatted to YouTube standard. It's always a compromise between the size (easiness to access) and the resolution (easiness to watch) of a video.

Answer to Q3: Posting source videos in a website is technically possible, but consumes disk space and more critically, bandwidth. Not to mention the significant technical effort to deal with various video formats and multi-browser compatibility. By contrast, YouTube offers an easy and generic way to share videos online, attributes that largely leads to its miraculous success. To some extent, it's more like the impact of Google on search engines. Given the superb performance of Google, developing a search engine for a specific website somewhat becomes pointless. In any case, iMech can still serve as a platform for discussion of mechanics-related videos available online via YouTube (or other service providers).

Answer to Q4: There're screencast softwares one can download and use for free. An easy search for "screen capture software" or "screen shot software" yields many results. I don't have comparisons among them, but just randomly used one. Maybe someone with more experience can make a better recommendation.

Zhigang Suo's picture

Here is a report in Nature on how scientists are using YouTube, or reinventing it.  Teng and Ravi:  You guys were ahead of the game.

Teng Li's picture

Zhigang, Thanks for the heads-up. The idea of Journal of Visualized Experiments is interesting. It provides a more academic channel to broadcast videos on science & technology. It's a decent place to publish videos, but has much less audience than YouTube (at least for now). I'll be interested in how it will progress, since I'm not quite sure if it is really a good idea to increase the entry barrier for researchers who want to share their videos online.

-Teng

>>>www.macroelectronics.org<<<

Teng Li's picture

iMechanica has upgraded to Drupal 5.0 .  The function of the text editor, TinyMCE, is also enhanced. Now posting a video become much easier.

In the orginal post above, the 5-step instruction involves turning on/off TinyMCE to post a video in iMechanica, which turns out to be tricky to many iMechanicians. Now you can post a video without changing your texteditor setting.  A simplified 4-step instruction is given below:

Step 1: Sign up a free account at YouTube.com, a website you can share videos online. Upon sign up, you can upload videos to YouTube. Follow the easy directions there. Of course you may want to read copyright tips of YouTube before uploading.
Step 2: Once uploaded, your video will have a Unique URL. You can always
provide a hyperlink of the video in your post. To directly embed the video into a post, you need to use the html code automatically generated by YouTube, which you can easily find below the unique URL in the video information. Copy the entire html code.
Step 3: Start to post a new entry. First, type in all the text part of post, and leave a blank line for the video to be embedded. Then click the "HTML" button in the TinyMCE toobar. A HTML Source Editor window will pop up, in which are the text you just typed in and some html tags. Locate the blank line and paste the html code from Youtube there. Click the "Update" button in the pop-up window.
Step 5: A yellow block in the main text editing box indicates the video has been embedded. Preview then submit. Now all iMech users can view your video without leaving your post!

Enjoy vlogging in iMechanica!

Kejie Zhao's picture

Hi Prof. Li,

Many thanks for the clear steps of posting a vedio. But now I find the embedded YouTube movies can not be shown, only left a yellow block area, in my blog. I also find this problem is encountered in other recent posts of Channel vedio. I hope this is my Internet Explore problem, but not a general one. Thank you

 Kejie Zhao 

Hwo now how attachment the video from YouTube? download link how i can take?? free download antivirus kaspersky

Brapaz's picture

Hello,I have pasted the HTML code of Youtube in "HTML source editor" and pressed the update button, but nothing happened!Maybe there are some problems!Thanks

Nuwan Dewapriya's picture

I also tried, but it didn't work.

Nuwan Dewapriya's picture

Have to use the html code given under "Use old embed code" option in youtube Share>Embed. Then it works!

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