Requesting automatic embedding of Youtube and SoundCloud links

Question

In Music SE we can embed Youtube videos and SoundCloud audio to our questions and answers just by posting the link. Here's an example.

I think that feature would be very useful and convenient here.

Answer 1

I would suggest starting a collection of posts here that would be significantly improve by the addition of these features.

It sort of makes sense (allowing embedded sound on a 'Music' site), but we are always a bit cautious about activating multi-media content on these sites. The main source of traffic for this site will be search, so overly-gratuitous use of these features are essentially burying (potentially) a lot of content in black box that cannot be seen by search engines. So rather than guessing whether this will actual help or hurt this site, it is better to see how these features would be used in actual practice.

Good luck!

Answer 2

I think we should revive this proposal. Does anyone know how to obtain this?

Answer 3

This request has been raised repeatedly: see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

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Here is some data from a SEDE query by @SQB that shows the number of questions and answers containing a YouTube link:

• 905/2581 questions have a YouTube link: ~35%
• 1148/3427 answers have a YouTube link: ~33%

Including SoundCloud links does not change these statistics by much:

• 933/2581 questions have a YouTube or SoundCloud link: ~36%
• 1148/3427 answers have a YouTube or SoundCloud link: ~33%

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For comparison, here are the statistics for Music: Practice & Theory SE where YouTube and SoundCloud link embedding is enabled:

• 1476/19190 questions have a YouTube or SoundCloud link: ~8%
• 2218/50681 answers have a YouTube or SoundCloud link: ~4%

One can also compare with the statistics for Movies & TV SE where YouTube link embedding is enabled:

• 986/19813 questions have a YouTube link: ~5%
• 2290/32647 answers have a YouTube link: ~7%

Answer 4

Thank you very much for the suggestion. I've sent a request to the dev team to enable embedding.

A short note

I took a look at data. Right now there are 674 not deleted questions with a link to "youtube.com" (out of 2.7K questions total). Among those questions I found that:

1. There are a lot of questions where a link to Youtube is used as a context. For example

   They're both soundtracks. One is James Horner's OST to the film called 'A Beautiful Mind', while the other is an album composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson for 'The Theory of Everything'.

2. Also I've seen a lot of ID questions that link to Youtube. I even found a question where a video somehow got embedded and the question looks fine.

As a result in general I would keep without embedding videos the questions where a link to Youtube is provided as a context (like in the example above) because it might break the reading flow. On the other hand, ID like questions could benefit from embedding the content to the question page.