Yesterday I went though some of my past posts, some of them only contain a video I found on YouTube or Vimeo. Since I haven’t been paying attention to my blog, some of these embeded videos were not working. They relied on a WordPress Plugin that might have been disabled on my blog during an update or two.

As far as I know there are two ways to fix my broken videos.

Option 1 — Enable the plugin again

Go and reactive the plugin by going to:
Dashboard → Posts → Plugins

The plugin is called “Viper’s Video Quicktags 6.2.17”

This works but it might break in the future again. However it is quite easy to fix.

Option 2 — Not rely on the plugin

This is the fix that I went with. It meant that I had to go back to each post that I found had a broken video and replaced this

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6nO5RZLjdw[/youtube]

with something like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6nO5RZLjdw

This new method is a really easy way to embed videos.

Instead of relying on a plugin I just pasted the url to the YouTube, Vimeo or Flickr page
and WordPress inserts the proper embed code instead of the url. I have to admit it is a bit like magic.

Here is an example:

http://vimeo.com/4446890

That’s all you need to do. So next time you want to post a quick video into you blog just copy and paste the url of the youtube page you are on into a new post and WordPress will do its part to embed the video properly.

This works because WordPress supports Oembed.
Here is a bit more information on how you can use it and what websites are supported.

And now for your entertainment, another video by the talented David Ko. Enjoy.