Video help, tips, and techniques (2024)

Permalinks

Whenever you refer to files at archive.org, use our permalink-style form for the file within the item. It is of the form
https://archive.org/download/IDENTIFIER/FILE

Video embedding

This allows you to setup a video player that serves an item from archive.org on another site like Wordpress, a blog, or a website.

NOTE: We've tested EMBED on tumblr.com, boingboing.net, blogspot.com blogs, and Wordpress blogs.

Feature notes:

• Playlists
  As of mid-January 2012, we support playlists! (see below)
• Fullscreen button
  Supported for when the "flash plugin" variant of our embedded player is picked.
  Support for when the "html5" variant is picked, varies a bit across browsers.
  (For example, webkit-based browsers like Safari and Chrome can fullscreen).
• Captions/Subtitles work
  If you upload files in the simple SubRip format (suffix ".srt"), we will pair them with the video files. We'll even try to autodetect a "label" when there are 2+ .srt files.
  So for example, if you upload a file named:
  myvideo.avi
  you can upload accompanying files named:
  myvideo.en.srt
  myvideo.fr.srt
  for an english and french translation of captioning.

How to embed and options:

• Example full embed code:
  

  Show me!

• You can see our new permalink-style embed codes with our new video player. Click the "Play" icon (to get the video playing)
  Mouseover the video -- in the upper left corner, you will see a "Share Video" overlay (image looks like

  

  ) that you can click to get the (iframe-based) embed code.
  For more kinds of embed examples, you can click the image overlay in the upper left for "Embedding Examples and Help" (image looks like

  

  ).
  Some sample ways to customize the behaviour of the "embed" urls, used within the embed code above, follow.
• Embeds a video item.
  If the item contains 2+ playable uploaded files, this embeds all of the files within the item by default, sorted "naturally" (mostly alphabetically, via our backend PHP code):

  Show me!

• Embed video with "autoplay":
  

  Show me!

• Embed video with clickable "playlist":
  

  Show me!

• Embed video with clickable "playlist" and specific list height:
  

  Show me!

• Embed video with clickable "playlist" *and* "autoplay":
  

  Show me!

• Embed a single specific video file for item with 2+ video files:
  Notice you use the name of the "original" video file that was uploaded (and we figure out what additional formats we were able to transcode/"derive" from and then figure out what the video player can handle).

  NOTE: using a *different* item with 2+ video files, to show specific single file usage...

  Show me!

• Embed video with a specific (any!) "click to play" image:
  

  Show me!

• Advanced/rare: Embed videos or audio from more than one item into a playlist:
  • There is a basic example here
  • EVEN SIMPLER text-based simple file: basic embeddable, responsive playlist here (try "view source"!)