Adding multimedia to your connexions content  (Page 8/10)

The actual display for the previous example is

Using third-party services

It is possible to embed videos and other multimedia files from sites such as YouTube or SlideShare into your module, just as you might embed them on your own personal web site. Please keep in mind, however, that unlike media files attached to Connexions modules, there is no guarantee that these resources will be always be available to your readers. Also, content hosted on third-party websites is not necessarily released under the same open licenses as Connexions content, meaning that other authors won't have the same rights to edit and modify content as they would with an attached media file. For these reasons we strongly encourage you to consider providing your own attached media files whenever possible.

Most resources hosted by a third-party service can be embedded using the same process as an attached video or flash file as described earlier, with the src attribute pointing to the URL of the video rather than a local file. Some of these external resources, however, require a little extra work by the author.

Embedding youtube videos

If you choose to include YouTube videos in your module, you will need to first copy the information provided in the Embed HTML snippet provided by YouTube for the video you wish to use. As an example, consider this video of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. The Embed snippet for this video is as follows: <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RMINSD7MmT4&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RMINSD7MmT4&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always"allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> Since this code is designed for use on websites and not the CNXML language, the majority of this snippet is not necessary. The part that is important is the embed tag : <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RMINSD7MmT4&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always"allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"> The CNXML example below illustrates how to embed a YouTube video in your module. Notice that it is implemented like a standalone video, with a few key features:

• The media subtype is <iframe> , not <video> - this is because the YouTube player uses iframe for embeds.In practice, the <video> element would work just fine to embed a simple YouTube player, but some features (such as being able to view the movie in full screen mode) would not be available.
• The src attribute is set to the embed URL for the video, not the URL for the video on the YouTube website . The embed URL is the one found in the code snippet as shown above and is of the form http://www.youtube.com/embed/[VideoID] (where [VideoID] is the ID of the video you wish to include in your module).
• After you copy the embed URL, you need to replace the & characters with & . The & character is a special character in CNXML and must be escaped in this manner, otherwise you will get an error when you try to save your module. In this example, src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RMINSD7MmT4 & rel=0" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RMINSD7MmT4 & rel=0"