SharePoint Video Star

The Buggles song might go ‘video killed the radio star’, but radio stations are still going strong twenty years on and it is video that has been rapidly changing. The pioneering video recorders of the late 70’s were replaced by DVD recorders and even the DVD recorders are now being superseded by systems like Sky Plus. I no longer have a machine capable of playing my cherished VHS Video of the Villa winning the 1982 European Cup. We now have a remarkable system called YouTube that has revolutionised the storage of video. Now, I can just type into Google ‘Villa European champions 1982 YouTube’ and the classic Peter Withe goal is available on my PC to watch over and over again. So what has YouTube got to do with SharePoint? YouTube contains millions of short video clips and some of them are even quite useful in a business environment. Yes, there are thousands of slightly inappropriate ones and many more that are just boring even if they are of cute kittens, but YouTube can have many positive uses. As well as reminding us of the adventures of Captain Pugwash it can also show important Safety Demonstrations or promoting new systems. So why not play a useful YouTube video in a SharePoint webpart? It could be the same video every day or easily changed for a different video that is appropriate to the SharePoint Site. Maybe companies can store their own training videos on YouTube and then play then through their own SharePoint. The question now is how do you get your YouTube video to play in SharePoint. Well, it is very easy to do and doesn’t cost anything (providing. of course. you already have either WSS 3.0 or full MOSS). All you have to do is add the much under used webpart ‘Content Editor’. You can add this by simply choosing ‘Edit Page’ and then click ‘Add Webpart’ in the column where you want the video screen to appear. Then scroll down until you come to the ‘Miscellaneous’ section and the ‘Content Editor webpart’. After you add this powerful little webpart you can click on the ‘open tool pane’ and then you are ready to add your video clip. I know I normally don’t mention code in my blogs and usually leave this to the officetalk Developers but this time it is so easy I am going to mention what you do. 1. Just copy the code below to your clipboard (select it all and right-click ‘Copy’ on your mouse) zobject width="425" height="344"@zparam name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/q8eiboPFmNA&hl=en&fs=1"@z/param@zparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"@z/param@zembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/q8eiboPFmNA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"@z/embed@z/object@ 2. Open Notepad and copy in text. 3. From Edit - Replace replace all of the z for < 4. Back from start of text with Edit - Replace replace all the @ with > 5. Select all the text and then 'Copy'. 6. On your SharePoint Site Edit Page and insert a ‘Content Editor Wepart’. 7. Click on ‘open tool pane’ and then open the ‘Source Editor’ option. 8. Paste in the copied code. 9. Say Ok and you have a classic cartoon video inserted that advertises the popular backup software AvePoint which Officetalk sell. The video is of one of the early version of AvePoint so please don’t try and win the motor bike. 10. It is probably best to then change the title of your webpart from ‘Content Editor Webpart’ to something more appropriate. That is how easy it is to enable a YouTube Video webpart in SharePoint. You can also resize it by changing the width and height in the code, but make sure you keep the ratio or you might get some strange results. It could be that you want to insert a video other than the one I have given you. Well, it gets easier because to insert any YouTube video all you have to do is search for the video on YouTube. Select it and on the right you will see a box called ‘Embed’ and there you will find all the code that you need. All you do then is copy this code into your ‘Content Editor’ webpart and Bob’s your Uncle.