How To – Metacafe Video in Lifetype

Since version 1.1.2 (?) of Lifetype, you can embed Youtube and Google videos in the post easily. But there are other good video sites such as Metacafe.com and livevideo.com, so how can we embed those videos into the post? Here is the how to guide, but some background first.

You know, to include a video in the post, just click the Youtube icon from the editor toolbar, and then enter the video URL (copy from Youtube), e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXXXXXXXXXX

Lifetype will turn this command after you confirm it to a bunch of codes:

Now back to Metacafe.com, if you find a video you like to embed to your blog post, you cannot simply copy the embed code from Metacafe and copy to your post because Lifetype will strip out all the tags she doesn’t like.

However, all you need is from the Metacafe video page, capture 3 values:

1. The source (most likely in the format of http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer/999999/YYYYY.swf)
2. The width of the video (most likey 400)
3. The height of the video (most likey 345)

Now to embed this video to your post, just follow the steps:

1. Click the HTML icon from the editor menu bar
2. Enter (or copy from somewhere) the above Youtube bunch of codes
3. In the objecttag, replace the width, heightand data attribute with what you got from Metacafe.
4. In the param tag (with name=”movie”), replace the attribute “value” with the source URL from Metacafe.

Update it and you are done !! BTW, the tricky thing with this approach is you won’t see the “Video player” in your editor window, but only in the HTML, the blog post preview or the blog post itself.

Sample here … the second video in the Chinese New Year post.

Enjoy.

Author: Michael Yung

Michael possessed over 30 years of experience in Information Technology with focuses on complex application development, database technologies and IT strategy. He also spent the last 20 years in Internet technology, eCommerce development / operations, web usability, computer security and Public Key Infrastructure technologies. View all posts by Michael Yung