If you are using my Insert Video plugin and the latest Windows Live Writer Wave 3 beta, you will probably find that you are getting an error when trying to insert. This is a bug, but not with my plugin. The Live Writer team somehow managed to break the API that the plugin uses. This has been raised with them and they are now aware of the problem, so hopefully that should get fixed in the next release.

Apologies for any inconvenience this causes, but ‘twas not me guv’nor ;)

In a decision I have been mulling over for quite some time now, I have finally decided to release my Insert Video plugin's source code. The reason I hadn't released it before was because of the amount of time and effort I had put into making the plugin, it was my pride and joy, and I wasn't comfortable releasing all my hard work so freely, call it selfish if you will, I don't care .

If I'm honest though, the main reason I have released this isn't so people can see how I made the plugin, but to be able to add to it themselves. I have a number of projects that I'm working on at the moment and just don't have the time to maintain the plugin, to add in the video sites that people are requesting. So I figured if the source code is out there, the community themselves can actually update and build the plugin themselves with added sites.

Now, I will warn any enthusiast that wants to look at the code, it's not clean, this was mainly written about 18 months ago and I was still very much finding my feet when it came to programming, having just got back into it again. There are virtually no comments, if any at all. My logic, whilst seemingly logical to me, might escape others and have them scratching their head thinking "what the f...". I don't blame you, I actually had the same problem when I did the last update . But, I'm more than happy to help people out in trying to decipher the code, and if they do have any problems, then please feel free to raise a new discussion post and I will help out in there. You can email me if you really need to, but I am requesting that the discussions be held within the discussions section on CodePlex, this is mainly so that others can see the questions and answers.

So, go over to the source code now on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/InsertVideo

SL

Whilst writing this I was listening to Oasis - 10 Cigarettes & Alcohol

Just noticed on Live Gallery that my Video plugin has reached over 10,000 downloads Awesome.

SL

Whilst writing this I was listening to Foo Fighters - Breakout

Ok, I signed off on my first alpha release of version 4 of my Video plugin the other day, it was a nice feeling . Now I need some help. One of the biggest changes to this version is the inclusion of multilingual support, but for that to happen, I need people to help me translate. At the moment, the languages I have available are English (duh), Dutch, German and Italian. Now, when this plugin [finally] ships, I'd like to have French and Spanish ship as default languages with the plugin, but I need a good volunteer to do these translations.

If you think that person is you, please email me at wlm[at]scottisafool.co.uk and put "Translate Me" as the subject.

Now, the second thing I want help with is regarding what else to include in the plugin. Now, I already put out a request for suggestions for the plugin, but I would just like to reiterate that request, and this is suggestions for features for the plugin as well as video sites to include. These should either be left as comments on here or emailed to the above address with "Feature Request" as the subject.

I look forward to hearing from you

SL

Whilst writing this I was listening to Queen - Somebody To Love

Ok, the implementation of translations is all but done now (see screenshot), but I want to know what features you would like to see in the next version. Answers on a postcard to wlm@scottisafool.co.uk (or leave a comment).

SL

Anyone who reads my personal blog will know I'm a big Coventry City football fan. Well yesterday we won again and are still top of the league. How cool. But what does this have to do with developing? Well, I topped another "league" today. My video plugin is now the most downloaded Writer plugin on Windows Live Gallery

Thanks to all those who have downloaded and left me feedback and suggestions to make it better.

Just a note about v4 of the plugin. It is still my intention to release a new version, although its development has taken a bit of a back burner as I've been working on other plugins. As a kind of apology, I will be putting out a new v3 update (yes, I know I said I wasn't going to) that will include a few more video sites.

SL

Whilst writing this I was listening to John Williams - The Hunt

The ever increasing number of video services that my plugin supports has just grown again, adding another two to its list: BrightCove and DivShare, these have both been added as requests. Only videos will work from DivShare, so don't try with MP3 links, it won't work. It's at this point with the plugin that I have decided to an extra bit of assistance to the plugin in the form of a quick helper window. It shows you what video services are supported and gives an example of each link type:

This can be got to by clicking the Examples link in the main window:

The other new feature in this version is specific to YouTube videos. Recently they added a related videos bar that appears in embedded videos. There is now an option if you put this in your blog entry to turn it off:

This option is only visible when a YouTube URL is used, otherwise it's hidden. This option is not one that can be set in the options, and by default is turned on, so if you don't want it there, you have to turn it off.

This build also comes with a couple of minor bug fixes, and a correction to how Yahoo! videos are dealt with, due to them changing the way they have their URLs. Don't forget, this now uses the new installation method that my installers use, so if you have a previous version of the plugin, go to C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\Plugins and delete the InsertVideo.dll, then run the installer.

As always, you can download the Video Plugin from the Live Gallery.

SL

I have updated my Video Plugin to include a new option, and as you can probably tell from the title of this post, it is the ability to set the video to autoplay when your blog loads. The option can, like most others, be set as a default option, or in the main window when putting your video link in:

Version 3.1.0.10 can be downloaded from the Windows Live Gallery page.

Oh yeah, please use this feature wisely, otherwise it could annoy people who visit your blog, don't have multiple videos all set to autoplay!

SL

Recently I've been getting a lot of support emails for my video plugin from people who are having troubles inserting a video using my plugin, when I've subsequently asked them for the video link so that I can give it a go as well, I find that they haven't really taken note of what I said when I first released my video plugin way back when. And to be fair to them, why should they, I posted it back in September (or something like that), and what's more, on a different blog. and I've never really repeated those instructions, not when version 2 was released and not when version 3 got released, so I can't blame people for not doing what I originally said.

The original instructions were to take the link from the "share" part of whatever video website you are getting the video from, and not the address bar, for the main reason that I was using those links to validate the video. So what people have been doing is, instead of putting in a video with www.youtube.com in the url, they have been putting youtube.com and so my plugin has been giving them an error and saying it's not a valid url, even though it clearly was. It has always been my intention to change this and make it work regardless of the www. or not, and in hindsight, I should have put this in the original release of V3, but in all honesty, I forgot!

So, now I have updated the video plugin (v3.0.1) so it doesn't matter whether your video url has www. or not, for any of the supported video sites, and as always is available to download from Live Gallery.

One final thing, I have noticed that due to the changes in policy at the moment from the Soapbox team, using the feature that puts the video name underneath the video will always return "Soapbox on MSN Video Beta", this is because the site now requires you to log in to actually get any information other than the embedding of the video. There is simply no workaround for this, sorry.

SL

Update: This has now been fixed and will shortly be available from the Windows Live Gallery. Do not download from the Gallery unless the version shows as 3.0.0.24 as this is the updated version. It is just pending approval at the moment.

Update 2: It is now live on Live Gallery.

It has been brought to my attention (and sadly confirmed ) that there is a slight bug in my Video Plugin for Windows Live Writer. The issue is simple, if you put more than one video into a blog entry, some of the video properties (like in the sidebar) get shared, and no matter what you set the insert method to be (full embed, image, plugin decides), it will always be the full embed code. This is something that I am now looking into and hope to have a resolution soon

SL

A couple of weeks ago, you might remember me asking for some beta testers for the next version of my Video Plugin for Windows Live Writer. The reason I did this was because I was rewriting it from the ground up, I was no longer building on the already existing plugin, and when you do that, there's always a chance of you missing something .

So, enough of the jibber jabber, let's get on with showing what Version 3 is all about. Well, for a start there's the new interface (which you saw an early version of in the beta testers post). Why did I go for a new interface when the old one worked fine? Well, basically, it's a new version, brand new, and unlike Windows Live Messenger, I'm not going to use a rehashed version of the old one (oh yes, I went there... ). So what does the final interface look like? This:

As you can see, it's very different from the previous versions. There are now a lot more options included in this version, and all options are configurable and you can set the defaults for them (more on this later). So let's have a look at these new options:

1. Enable preview - Pretty self explanatory, it shows you the preview of the video, and lets you play it to make sure you're putting in the right one;
2. Open link in new window - This option is only enabled if the embed type is Image + Link or Plugin Decides, and will set whether the link to the video page will open in a new window or not.
3. Enable video transparency - This is mainly seen when embedding videos from MSN Soapbox, you can set whether the video frame has transparency or not.
4. Include title with video (my favourite new feature) - This tells the plugin that you want the video title to appear with the video, and best of all, it gets that information for you just from the link you supply. Do note though, this does not work for MuveeMix or MySpace Videos, it will just say the video provider, but the link will send you to the correct video page.

The new interface also shows you what the size of the video is going to be, this is based on either the video provider's default size, or the custom size defined in the options.

Ok, so that's the new interface. Now, once you hit insert you will get the embedded video (or the image, depending on which option you chose), all this should look familiar to previous versions of the plugin, with one main exception now:

Notice the resize handles on the corners; videos can now be resized on the fly from within the blog entry, just by dragging one of the corners, and it will keep the aspect ratio, so you don't have to worry about that either. In the above screenshot you can also see the link underneath it that shows the video name.

Next we come onto the Sidebar in Live Writer:
 

<<< Here we have a link to the video, this will open straight in your web browser

<<< Here you can change the way in which the video is to be inserted in your blog entry

<<< Set whether the links open in a new window

<<< Set whether transparency is on or not

<<< Set whether the video has the title underneath it.

All the settings in the Sidebar will happen instantly, so you can an instant preview of what it will look like in your blog entry.

Now I mentioned earlier about configurable options, so let's take a look at the options window (Tools > Preferences > Plugins > Options):

Here you can see the options you have, they are basically the same as the ones you see in the main window, but these options determine what the main window's options show by default. These options will also be the options used if you paste a video link into the blog entry. From this window you will also be able to see some of the testers that were involved in helping me with this plugin.

As with previous versions of the plugin, you can still paste the video link into your blog entry and the plugin will pick that up and get all the relevant details. Doing this will use the default settings mentioned above.

One final thing to add is that I have added support for another site: www.myvideo.de.

You can download the new version of the plugin from Windows Live Gallery by going to the Video Plugin page. Please note, you can download the plugin only from Live Gallery, I will not be making it available from my site like I have done before; I will also be removing the other zip files from my site, but don't worry, if you link to the files, I will be putting a redirect in so that anything that goes to those files will get redirected to the relevant Live Gallery page. This goes for all of my plugins.

Any comments, feedback, or bugs you find with the plugin, please leave them as comments on this blog (regardless of entry) or email me at wlm[at]scottisafool.co.uk.

Download link.

Important Note: If you go to the Live Gallery site and you get an error when trying to download the plugins, see my guide on how to fix this, which should alleviate the error.

SL

As you may recall, I mentioned that Windows Live Spaces now allows you to embed videos into your blog entries and you'll also recall that I said my video plugin doesn't embed them into Live Spaces still. Well, I have no built a work around for that by adding in an option to explicitly choose whether you want the video embedded or not. So the plugin now looks like this:

I'll quickly run through the options that you now have in the plugin:

Embed Full Video

This option means that you will get the full embed code put into your blog entry and the reader can watch the video in your blog. Do remember that if your blog doesn't support embedded code, this option will post an empty space where the video once was.

Picture + Link

This will behave in the same way as if you were posting to Live Spaces (as an example) before the change. The plugin will take a screen capture of the video player and video, and put that image on the blog with that image linked to the original video page.

Plugin Decides

This means the plugin will put the code in so that if your blog supports embedding it will have the embed code, if embedding isn't supported, then you will get an image as described above.

The latter option of letting the plugin decide is my recommended choice, but only if you're not using Live Spaces as your blog service. If you have been using the feature of pasting the video link straight into the blog entry and having it get the information and images for you, then the default behaviour for this is the same as choosing the "Plugin Decides" option. I am working on something that will allow this to be customised, look out for a future update.

I have also added support for www.muveeMix.com videos. So the list of supported video sites is now:

1. MSN Soapbox
2. YouTube
3. Google Video
4. MySpace Video
5. Yahoo! Video
6. MuveeMix

So I guess you'll be wanting the download link for the new plugin. It's below

Download: here.

SL