This wiki is intended to provide some guidelines for creating sharable video on the web. “Sharable video” is video that is hosted at

one domain but plays on the page of another domain.

 

Main Guildelines

Flash video

Sharable video should be implemented to play in the Flash player. This means videos will be represented by a SWF file. Flash video provides the most ubiquitous and consistent playback experience for users.

Embed codes

Sharable video is shared by the use of the HTML <embed> or <object> tags. Read about implementing codes for more details.

The YouTube defacto standard

On the original page for the video, provide an HTML read-only input field which contains the embed code for playing that video on another site. Read more about implementing codes and sharing antipatterns for specific details.

The Facebook protocol

Facebook.com supports automatically grabbing sharable video details from a page, as described http //www.facebook.com/share_partners.php. The basic mechanism is as follows:

1. Use a link tag in the header of the original page to describe the source and flashvars for the video embed. So for the embed code:

    <embed src="http://mysite.tv/player.swf" flashvars="video_id=5"></embed>

you would provide a tag in the header like this:

    <link rel="video_src" href="http://mysite.tv/player.swf?video_id=5"/>

2. To provide a URL to a thumbnail for the video, you would add a tag like this to the pag header:

    <link rel="image_src" href="video_screenshot_image_src url" />

Oembed

Oembed is another standard for sharing video that's based on implementing a web service for returning the embed code for a given page.

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