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One of my students asked me the following question:

I was thinking that since video is an emerging trend for communicating ideas on the web, that it would be nice to know how to seemlessly incorporate video into a Joomla site. There seems to be several options for video and wondered how do you determine which is best; stream from your site, use extensions like Seyret which pulls from video hosting sites like YouTube or Google, etc. I also had trouble with the default editor.

 The answer is, of course, it depends.  :-)

 So some considerations when thinking about video:

Format

Remember that most video requires some kind of plugin to the browser.  Typically video is QuickTime, Windows Media, or Flash Video these days. YouTube uses Flash video for great reasons. It doesn't require a humongous plugin to work in the browser.  (The QT plugin is something over 10 MB while the Flash player is under 1 MB if I remember correctly.) Flash is typically already installed with the browser, or you'll be asked to download it relatively soon. Finally, Flash player 8 had a very fast adoption rate. My theory is it was because YouTube adopted it, and everyone wanted to watch a YouTube movie, so the Flash player was adopted quickly.

Flash video comes in two pieces: the FLV file, which is the video itself, and a player, which is a SWF file. The SWF must be programmed to talk to the FLV file.

So, for a variety of reasons (not the least of which I'm an Adobe girl), I would seriously look at Flash as your format for web video, unless you had some compelling reason to look at QT or WM.

(Also, Adobe has great stuff built into Flash CS3 for putting together a video -- the players are already built for you, and all you need to do is set a few settings and a path to your video file, and you're good to go.)

Streaming

This is an easy one. If you can get it on YouTube, do it.  There are two huge advantages here. One is the amount of traffic that YouTube generates. You may get some new visitors to your site just based on the YouTube video you've posted.

YouTube, though, requires your video is less than 10 min in length or some file size that I can't remember just now, so there are limitations.

I would definitely look at your hosting package and your traffic when determining to stream from your site or get a streaming service, if YouTube isn't an option.  Bandwidth is typically limited in most hosting packages, and if you have shared hosting of some kind, and you get a bunch of traffic to your site, your streamed video could make life miserable for the other people who share your server.

So -- if you have a small site, not a lot of traffic, a good internet connection with your host, and the video file is relatively small, you could conceivably stream from your own site. Otherwise, I would really recommend some service for hosting your video and let them handle the streaming.

Incorporating into Joomla

 TinyMCE, the default Joomla editor, has some settings by default that will strip out most of your YouTube code and other video code.

In Joomla 1.5, log into the back end of your website, and go to the plugin manager. Find Editor - TinyMCE, and click it. There are a ton of settings here, but the goal is to turn off the "helpful" HTML editing (as Dreamweaver does, where it changes your HTML to make it work "better").  

• Set Code Cleanup on Startup to OFF
•  Code Cleanup on Save to NEVER
• Do not clean HTML entities to YES

If this does not work, and you're still getting your YouTube (or other video HTML) code stripped out, you'll need to go to the next level.

1. Find another Joomla editor that will allow you to embed video. There are several options out there and some are better than others. We're fond of Wysiwyg Pro, $54, but there may be free options as well.
2. Create yourself an administrator called "video". Set their HTML editor to "no WYSIWYG editor" via the User Manager. This will allow you to post HTML without it being edited for sure. However, it's something of a brute force method, as you will have to edit raw HTML. It's not good if your end users are wanting to post video.