You have a video to share, but don’t know how to share it. YouTube comes to mind, and you decide to upload it. When you view it later, you find that your video quality has been reduced significantly. What should you do? Why not try to embed your file on a web page directly as a WMV video?
Introduction
To share their videos, most people use YouTube, MetaCafe, and websites similar to them. Although it is easy to upload on these websites, and most of them are free and some even give rewards, sending videos to YouTube will sacrifice the video quality itself because of how the original files must be converted into *.flv by YouTube.
If you already have a set audience to share the video with, such as forums or chat rooms, it would be better not to upload it to YouTube, and instead embed it on a website as the original *.wmv files - without the risk of sacrificing the quality of your video. Here are ways to embed *.wmv files on websites.
First Method: Hyperlinking
The easiest way to do this is by hyperlinking. You just need to know a little about HTML hyperlinking using <a href =…> command. This is the possible code of direct hyperlinking to a video:
This method is so far the easiest one. By using the simple a href command, hyperlinking to the name of the video, and closing the hyperlink by , this will give you a direct link, which when clicked, will open a new page with a fully embedded video.
The pros and cons of using this method:
Pros:
+ Relatively easy code.
+ Easy to use anywhere—mostly in websites without embed feature.
+ Opens a new window to prevent any loss in previous link.
Cons:
- In reality opens one big window of type *.wmv embed, meaning that when opening a big video file, a big window will still be produced and this will be quite distracting.
- Uncustomizable.
Second Method: Direct Embed
The second method is to directly embed the video files into a website. This way is definitely more complex compared to the hyperlinking method, but in exchange, it is highly customizable, including the ability to change the width and height of the video as you please. The code for this is:
<OBJECT ID=“MediaPlayer” WIDTH=“192” HEIGHT=“190” CLASSID=“CLSID:22D6F312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95”
STANDBY=“Loading Windows Media Player components…” TYPE=“application/x-oleobject”>
The basic direct embed method is customizable, in which several commands on the video are changeable. The customizable parts of this method are in ShowControls, ShowStatusBar, ShowDisplay, and autostart at the EMBED TYPE command.
Here are what will change depending how you customize it. Enabling means changing the value to 1, and disabling means changing the value to 0:
- ShowControls: This command displays pause, play, stop, full screen, and volume. If you change the value of ShowControls to 0, your video will have no command to display. If you set this to 0 and set the autostart to 0 too, the video will not run.
- ShowStatusBar: Used to show the current status bar. If enabled, a status bar will appear in the video which shows the current progress of buffering, and when finished, the timeline of the video.
- ShowDisplay: Enabling this will reveal file information, such as the name of the video.
- Autostart: When this command is enabled, the video will run as soon as the buffering is complete. If not activated, video embed will wait for the user’s input [play button].
Pros:
+ Highly customizable according to your needs
+ Source is HTML code, easy to implement
Cons:
+ Relatively long source code, some people may have trouble remembering the exact commands.
