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Are we allowed to embed videos in questions/answers.
For eg, I posted a question about identifying an accent. It would certainly help the person answering if he could see the video even if he/she hasn't seen the movie.

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Update:

After reviewing your content and the moderation efforts to keep photos and such from causing problems with your content, we decided to activate video embedding on this site.

I'm not anticipating any problems, but please keep the concerns (listed below) in mind. Video should be used for clarification or supplemental information; that is, the text of the post should still be valid and useful, even if the video were omitted. Make sure you have permission to link and embed the content you are including, and please do not include videos needlessly or gratuitously just because you can.

Good job! and enjoy!

We have experimented with embedded video on a few sites, but I would like to see a clear history of needing audio/video before enabling it.

A few issues to consider:

  1. The lifeblood of this site is search, and video is not searchable. I'd hate to see a potentially well-worded question that describes the problem reduced to a video link asking "What does does this scene mean?" That will contribute absolutely nothing to the future of this site. It's a black box to the rest of the Internet.
  2. To ask questions containing video, you need a source for the content. There's not a lot of legally-available, open, and public sources of movies on the web. If a clip outlining your question just happens to be available on YouTube, you can link to YouTube.
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  • sounds fair to me.
    – Lelouch Lamperouge
    Commented Dec 31, 2011 at 3:45
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    @RobertCartanio is there any chance that this could be revisited? While I understand your concerns, the usage of youtube videos on movies&tv would be similar to that on arqade - for example see this question - obviously there are potential regional issues, but those issues still exist now, and embedding looks cleaner than posting links.
    – user1887
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 15:14
  • @RobertCartaino I would also like you to reconsider this. Regarding your first point: So far we have successfully made sure that questions and answers are valid and useful without the videos which only provide additional information. I am certain that we will continue on this path, even with embedding enabled, simply because not everyone has access to every video. We are basically doing the same with pictures right now and have banned questions and answers that are based on pictures alone. The same reasons apply there as for videos: 1) They could go offline. 2) They are not google friendly.
    – magnattic
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 0:16
  • Regarding 2): We have compiled a large list of questions and answers that could really benefit by adding this visual information.
    – magnattic
    Commented May 29, 2014 at 0:20
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    @atticae Nice job. Okay, we have enabled video embedding on this site. I have updated my post.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 3:32
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    @atticae We haven't really banned picture-only questions already. Besides that I feel the points about linking vs embedding regarding availability issues (as made in wbogazc's excellent answer on the other question) and the points about overuse and pollution are still very relevant, even if I can understand your arguments. Thus I for myself am not entirely sure if this new decision is really a good one.
    – Napoleon Wilson
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 10:37
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    As a technical question, how is this going to work? Is this done through special markdown syntax or maybe the same syntax as for images? Or will every YouTube link get turned into a video automatically? Surely you won't check any kind of link for video content automatically.
    – Napoleon Wilson
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 10:53
  • @NapoleonWilson Looking at this and the downvotes for 4c here, I think there is a strong consensus that picture only posts without further text/explanation are bad. In fact, if you look at the site, most of them tend to get downvoted and closed quickly. However, you are correct in pointing out that the discussion is not entirely over yet.
    – magnattic
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 13:38
  • I don't share your skepticism regarding the use of videos though. I think we did a very good job so far to apply common sense in the use of pictures and the maintenance of posts including those. I think we will be just as cautious with videos, so they don't get misused or provide a bad experience for parts of the visitors.
    – magnattic
    Commented May 30, 2014 at 13:41

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