Background Information
You start off with an HTML document. The document contains many elements. For example, there’s a paragraph element, a heading element, a link element, a list element etc. Your internet browser interprets the elements in your HTML document, and spits out the webpage that you see on your computer.
Inserting a Video: The Hard Way
The hard way of inserting a video into your website is by using the <video> tag. Basically… it’s hard because you have to do various things to make sure that the video plays properly in all the browsers. See http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_videos.asp if you want to learn how. And see this as an example:
<video width=”320″ height=”240″ controls autoplay>
<source src=”movie.ogg” type=”video/ogg”>
<source src=”movie.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″>
</video>
Inserting a Video: The Easy Way
Programming well is all about getting stuff done, and there’s no reason to do something the hard way when you could just do it the easy way. The easy way of inserting a video into your website is to 1) upload it to YouTube, and 2) use the iframe element. Like so:
<iframe width=”420″ height=”345″
src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/XGSy3_Czz8k”>
</iframe
– Adam Zerner
ComposingDigitalMedia: DIY Archives 