One limitation of a blog hosted on WordPress.com rather than an installation of WordPress via a web hosting company is that any code that you paste into the editor that contains JavaScript or embedded objects is usually sanitised for security reasons. That’s fair enough and the editor does allow video from YouTube, Google Video and Daily Motion to be easily added.
It’s not a documented feature, but by using a similar convention you can very very easily add Vimeo videos as well. Why would you want to? Well, it depends on the audience for your blog, but the content on Vimeo is original and very high quality. It’s free to set up an account and you can upload 500Mb of video per week.
So how do you add content from Vimeo to your WordPress.com blog? Easy. First of all you’ll need the to get video number from Vimeo site. That’ll be something like www.vimeo.com/123456. Take the number from the end of the URL, the 123456 part, and then type the following in your blog post, replacing 123456 with your own video number. You also need to remove the spaces that I have placed after the opening square bracket and before the closing square bracket.
[ vimeo vimeo.com/123456 ]
That’s all there is to it. When you preview or publish the post, the Vimeo information will be embedded into your post and will be ready for your readers to watch.
And so now you know, here’s a quick example of just how good Vimeo looks.
If you want to know more about the differences between a self-hosted wordpress blog and one hosted at wordpress.com you can get more details in this article at webglossary.co.uk.
Filed under: Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Support Articles , media, surfing, video, vimeo, wordpress
Many thanks, I prefer Vimeo to Youtube but couldn’t work out how to embed in my blog. Now sorted.
That’s great! Vimeo’s quality is better and youtube has this strange way of handling HQ, HD.
Your trick works, but I was wondering how it would be possible to have control on the size/ratio of the video box. For example, the same clip uploaded on both platforms will give on my blog a different video box size. Also both don’t respect the video’s ration and add black boxes…
Do you know of any workaround for these 2 issues?
Here’s the example of what I’m talking about:
http://charlau.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/comme-le-pecheur/
thanks
Well, I answered my own question, although not the ideal thing:
Went through vodpod and modified the w/h params automatically added in the tag
[ vodpod id=ExternalVideo.777966&w=469&h=264&fv= ]
maybe there’s similar params for Vimeo?…
Sorry, but I’m very PC illiterate.
I followed to the type ‘replacing…’ part but where do you do this and how?
Any help ?
@mike61
First of all check that your blog is on wordpress.com and not an install of WordPress that you’ve done yourself or had done by a web designer. This only works out of the box on wordpress.com.
Next you need to get the number of the video that you want to use from the Vimeo site.
So if the address of the video is http://www.vimeo.com/123456 you need the 123456 part.
Next write your blog post and when you’re ready to insert the video, type
[ vimeo vimeo.com/123456 ]
in the place when you want the video to appear.
You should replace 123456 with the real number of your video and remove the space between [ vimeo and between 123456 ] In the example, I add spaces so that you can see what to type. If I didn’t add the spaces, WordPress would show the video instead. If you’ve done it right, the only space left should be between the words vimeo and vimeo.com
Then publish the post and the video should be there.
Thanks this helped loads!
Thank you, this was exactly what I needed.