Recently there has been an uptick in the number people asking about how to embed videos from YouTube into Windows Live Writer so that you can include the video in your blog post. The problem stems from the fact that YouTube is using <IFRAME> as the default for their embed and Liver Writer is not really happy about the <IFRAME> tag in the Source view or pasted into the Insert Video dialog. There is a couple of reasons for this but one of the main reasons is that not very many blog servers support IFRAMEs and if you were to publish with one it would just get stripped out of the source and that might cause data loss for you. Off of the top of my head Blogger is the only one I know that lets you add an IFRAME in their blog editor. This post is about how to help you add a YouTube video to your blog so let’s move on.
If you are on the YouTube site you should be able to just copy the URL from your browser and paste it into Live Writer and it should convert it to a video and the location you have pasted. Alternatively you can select to Insert a Video from the web and paste the web address.
A problem can occur when you want to use the embed created from within a YouTube web page. The embed can contain more options beyond what you get by just pasting the web address into the Insert Video dialog. You used to be able to just copy that embed and paste it onto the Insert Video dialog or change to Source view and paste it there. Since YouTube has gone to IFRAME by default in the embed instead of an OBJECT tag this no longer works but there is a quick way to get it working with Live Writer.
When you click on Embed on the YouTube page check the check box to “Use old embed code” and this will switch the embed source from an IFRAME to an OBJECT which Live Writer can work with. This way you can paste it right into the Insert Video dialog in Live Writer or into the Source view. As you can see you have a lot of flexibility when pick the embed option in YouTube. You can pick a specific size for the video or elect to play the HD version as examples.
If this was helpful for you please leave me a comment in this post.
Aaron\'s Live Writer Blog 
[…] Embedding YouTube videos in Windows Live Writer (IFRAME problems): livewriterblog.wordpress.com […]
Pingback by Sites Friday, 28 January 2011-Victorian floods-NFS Shift 2-Best free games and timewasters-300 Million Windows copies sold-Imagine Cup « webDotWiz talks Windows Live — January 28, 2011 @ 1:22 AM
[…] ちなみに、Live Writer に Youtube を貼るときですが、＜IFRAME＞ は使えません。 これは、Live Writer が今の Ver 15.4 に上がった時からだと思いますが、それまで使えてきた機能が NG になってしまいました。 そのため、いまは Youtube の URL を貼るという方式で対処しています。 […]
Pingback by Live Writer で Youtube が貼れないけど、IE9 が RC だからなの？ « Agile Cat — in the cloud with openness — April 15, 2011 @ 8:29 PM
Thanks for the post. Really hope there could be a WLW update that solves this issue soon, I cannot imagine all my users could dig into these details of how to make this work, most of them are non-techies.
Comment by ray — May 18, 2011 @ 4:41 PM
[…] Tags: Live Writer 2011, Wave 4, YouTube — Aaron Bregel @ 10:06 PM About a year ago I blogged about how the URL created for sharing of a YouTube video would not work in the Insert Video dialog […]
Pingback by Shorten YouTube URLs are not friendly with Windows Live Writer –- A solution « Aaron's Live Writer Blog — February 21, 2012 @ 10:06 PM