2012-12-05 How you can and should post YouTube videos to Chatango group chat

It is easy to post YouTube videos in Chatango group chats,
if you know a little about those subjects.
(Assuming it was not disabled by an administrator or something like that.)


YouTube videos
are identified by urls.

I'll use a video with the title Alfie Kohn - The Case Against Competition
and the video url http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8H6yqEtds4.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8H6yqEtds4 is the text that goes
to your browsers address bar in order to go to the web page,
where that video usually would be shown on YouTube.

This example is in it's most basic and direct form.

If you post such a basic direct video url in your chat message,
chatango will usually transform it to an embedded video.

But you probably should do more than that
and you may not have such a basic direct video url to begin with.
Therefore you should learn more:

http://www.youtube.com tells your browser to go to YouTube,
while /watch tells YouTube, that you want to watch a video.

The question mark ? in the url marks the beginning of the parameters
given in the url.

v=d8H6yqEtds4 will say YouTube, that there is a parameter v,
that has the value d8H6yqEtds4.
The parameter v is for identifying the video, you want to watch
and so the value it has must do just that - identify the video.

Urls can have more than only one parameter.
If they do have more than one parameter, those are normally separated by &.

Urls can also end with an anchor part marked by #.

So the url you managed to find, may perhaps look like that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=d8H6yqEtds4#!

I don't know if this given example would be a problem with chatango,
but it could be and I have seen it do weird, not useful things when feed with
YouTube urls not in the basic direct form.

I don't know of any generic YouTube way to get such a basic url,
that would work every time, but you should be able to do that yourself,
using the chat input box itself or a simple text editor like notepad.

If the v parameter is not already first, like...watch?v=...,
you find it in the url like ... &v=... and make it so
by deleting everything in between including the & but not the ?.
If there is anything after the v parameter - denoted by a & or #,
you delete the rest, starting at and including that denoting character.

Using that example, you should now be left with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8H6yqEtds4 [again].

Update(2013-01-02):

I created a simple tool to simplify any complicated YouTube video url you might have automatically.

I posted about that here:

2013-01-02 Get simple YouTube urls tool

Update(2013-09-08):

I created another tool - a bookmarklet, that can be used on the YouTube video site itself
to prepare for posting that video in Chatango (group) chat.
2013-09-07 YouTube bookmarklet (for chatango)

How I think you should post a YouTube video in Chatango group chat

I think you should let the user know the title and also have the url in a visible form.

You should know this about Chatango:

One way or another chatango will try to interpret, what it thinks are urls.
In my estimation those are words starting with http: or something similar.

Chatango will either try to convert such urls to embedded videos
- f.e. when they point to YouTube -
or convert them to clickable links.

You can however prevent that by directly enclosing them in brackets or quotes
- no spaces or anything between the enclosing characters and the urls!

One thing that has shown to create problems is,
when you put text after the url that embeds the video
- the preview picture may conceal [parts of] the text.

So you should always put the url to embed a video
as the very last thing that goes into your chat post.

I could usually not enter any line breaks in chatango group chat,
but trying that resulted in immediately sending the post.

For some users embedded videos don't seem to work,
but they would like to see the url, to be able to get to the video some other way.


All the above background input led me to come up with a way,
I think, videos should be posted in Chatango group chat.

I'll give you an example.

This is what I entered into the chats input field:

Alfie Kohn - The Case Against Competition  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8H6yqEtds4)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8H6yqEtds4

The title, followed by 2 spaces,
then the url in brackets, followed by 2 spaces
and finally the bare url (to be transformed to an embedded video)

This example then came to look like this:

While automatic line breaks and the limited size of the chat box ...
tend to obscure it a little, there is your embedded video
and it's title and visible form of the url above.


If you create or come across a better tutorial about those subjects,
please do leave a comment with a link to it here also.