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Embedded YouTube videos are possible on a per-site basis.

I think Woodworking is a good site to enable them on, for various how-to videos and such, which are plentiful on YouTube. It'll also make it easier for answerers to shoot their own videos and include them in posts.

I believe woodworking is a topic that is particularly well-suited to videos.

For comparison, here is the percentage of questions that have at least one answer with YouTube links on Woodworking compared to some of the other sites with embeds enabled (updated 2016-Sep-10):

SITE       YT ANSWERED  QUESTIONS       
Movies            2391      12567  19.03%
Music              848       8543   9.93%
Woodworking         93       1217   7.64%
Sci-Fi            2079      33874   6.14%
Space Ex           250       4565   5.48%
Gaming            2877      70736   4.07%

Doesn't really hold a candle to Movies, but still pretty comparable.

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  • Good job adding the SEDE link. Sci-Fi has the feature and we are beating them.... at this one thing.
    – Matt
    Commented Nov 24, 2015 at 0:32
  • 1
    I've added Woodworking to the list of sites which have requested YouTube embedding. (See Which sites have YouTube embedding on?)
    – Stevoisiak
    Commented Jul 31, 2017 at 13:16

1 Answer 1

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For the amount of questions and answers we already have with youtube links in them this is a must. Assuming that it does not affect the sites performance too much. I recall that being a reason to an add-on for displaying measurements.

In woodworking there are many examples of it is easier to show than it is too explain. This feature would compliment a large number of our questions giving them extra value.

I already take stills and use them to link to the youtube videos. Adding this to WW would make it easy and simple for all users.

In the mean-time (and in the future if this feature is not added) we can follow the steps from another answer in the linked meta post. It is certainly easier that what I was doing. 

[![Video thumbnail](https://img.youtube.com/vi/gUmMcecHN9s/mqdefault.jpg)  
**SAML101** on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUmMcecHN9s)

Simply replace gUmMcecHN9s (in both places) with the video ID of your choice and alter the caption.

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  • It doesn't have the performance hit that MathJax does (I believe you are referring to this request), which is much more complicated process. Its performance is more analogous to inserting images.
    – Jason C
    Commented Nov 23, 2015 at 14:27
  • MathJax... that was the one. Capable of doing so much but we only wanted it for a small part.
    – Matt
    Commented Nov 23, 2015 at 14:28
  • Second to this request. I know I've personally added quite a few video links for my Answers.
    – grfrazee
    Commented Dec 17, 2015 at 18:52
  • @JasonC I'll point you to a comment made by Shog on SpaceEx.SE, it's not about the bandwith, etc the biggest issue is dropping a link without any type of explanation along with it. If you can demonstrate that the site won't become full of link-only answers that are useless if the site is down, then we'll definitely consider it.
    – Taryn
    Commented Jan 12, 2016 at 14:18
  • 2
    @bluefeet in most of the cases I have seen here it is used to complement current answers. The community has been pretty adament about closing link only questions and answers thus far. Woodworking is a very hands on experience where videos are a natural education medium. While it would be beneficial if we had the extension we would survive without it. Having it might encourage users to link videos to bolster their contributions.
    – Matt
    Commented Jan 12, 2016 at 14:40
  • @bluefeet I think I can show that and will try to build a case based on existing answers as soon as I can. I also believe that with appropriate discussion on meta we can encourage a policy of flagging any YouTube-only answers that may crop up. I do not believe that allowing YouTube videos to play embedded vs. static links will add additional encouragement for link only answers but you do have more of a birds eye view than I. I'll work on this later. (I also hypothesize that it will have a nice benefit of retaining new users instead of shuffling them off to YouTube.com and leaving them there)
    – Jason C
    Commented Jan 12, 2016 at 16:17
  • Is there any progress on getting this feature at Woodworking? I use youtube a lot and have links that could supplement answers on a number of questions.
    – Ashlar Mod
    Commented Feb 23, 2016 at 3:18
  • I've wanted to add a short snippet of a YT video as the core to a question recently posted, but I personally always prefer to stay on site, so I opted to extract a short animated GIF using an online service. Turns out one can roughly fit 9seconds of video under the 2MB upload limit. It might also help with reducing broken links in the future. I did wonder about fair use however when I did so. I think it's generally a good idea to describe in text what happens too, to help with indexing/search.
    – ww_init_js
    Commented Nov 2, 2018 at 0:02

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