I removed all embedded videos from this blog, as part of the ongoing mission of ensuring no third parties can track readers of this blog. There were 4 types of video embeds in this blog.
- Qik.com embeds of live streaming I did on occasion. Qik is no longer active and I simply removed all embeds.
- 23Video embeds, which E used for FabLab related videos. While 23Video still exists, E’s account is no longer active, so I simply removed those embeds as well.
- YouTube embeds, which I all replaced with a still image and a link. Some videos were no longer online.
- Vimeo embeds, which I also replaced with a still image and a link. Interestingly enough, Vimeo embeds were not working for videos Vimeo listed as ‘unrated’. In those cases you would need to be logged into Vimeo to see them, defeating the purpose of embedding them. There were also Vimeo videos where I am certain noone has access to the account anymore (as they were channels for projects I was involved in). I wonder what will happen to them over time.
This was a straight forward effort, as I hadn’t embedded many videos here in the first place (40-50 in total).
What stood out to me was that of all those videos, two videos were no longer on YouTube because they were moved to a self hosted environment (videos of the C3 conferences, no surprise given the background of its organisers). A good move, but probably still hard to do for many, and without the easy reach YT and others provide.
I went through a similar process, hitting similar walls. The one place I departed from your practice was that I downloaded all my YouTube and Vimeo videos and serve them directly, self-hosted, using HTML video markup.
Those are videos you created yourself, right? I don’t have those really (apart from the old Qik live streams, which are no longer online at all), the videos are all by other people.
Yes, they’re all videos I created myself, other than a few public donation ones. For others, I did as you, and removed the embed and replaced with a link.
@ton I should do something similar on my blog, thankfully the Broken Links plugin makes it easy to find all the posts where I’ve linked to or embedded YouTube / Vimeo content.
@wearsmanyhats should have thought about the Broken Links plugin! 🙂
@ton , did this several years ago to stop YT-cookies invading my site.