Embed Plus – A strange but intriguing service

A few weeks ago I wrote a little article about TubeChop and how easy it is to take a YouTube video and edit it to show a specific section. It is a good little service, easy to use, straight forward, and it let’s you link to the newer, shortened video. On that post Tay from Embed Plus stopped by and left a comment encouraging me to take a look at his service embedplus. The site allows you some other services as well as shortening YouTube videos. When I first got to the site I was disappointed. Not going to lie about it. I thought to myself TubeChop is waaaaay better than this thing. A weird thing happened though. As I explored the site, I started to like what they were doing. Intrigued? You should be. Hit on past the break to see why embedplus maybe a tool you should check out.

Oh yeah, leave a comment or Omar will embedplus you! (not sure what that means but it doesn’t sound pleasant :o)

Weird

When I first landed on the site the have an example of what a standard YouTube video looks like and then what embedplus can do to that video. It’s actually quite a lot. You can shorten it (as I mentioned above), add markers so you can quickly skip between parts, zoom, slow motion, add your own annotations, loop and instant replay, real-time reactions (using Twitter and YouTube) and some more features. Sounds great right? It is pretty neat, even if I probably won’t use many of those features as a teacher, it’s nice to know that I can use them if I want.

So what’s so weird? Well let me take you through it. First, you do not need to create an account or sign in. You just dive right into the service. so let’s do that. Just click on the Get Started button on the front page to start. This is what you see next.

Whaaat? I was expecting to paste in a URL from YouTube or to search for a video on YouTube, but this is what I’m greeted with. Don’t tell me you don’t think that this is not a little weird. If you click Yes, a link will appear for you to install a WordPress.org plugin for your site so the video will be shown with all the features of an embedplus video. If you select No, then click Next and your off to the next screen where you will input the URL for the YouTube video. You can also search from the home page as well.

Once done it will take you to this screen (yeah, it’s a long image) that lets you change the start and stop time, add markers, pretty much all that good stuff I mentioned above.

*If you notice something weird with the Scene Markers section, that is due to my screen capture program, not embedplus.

Wow that was a long screen. Click on Get Code and you’re nearly ready done. It will take you to another window which will show you the new and improved version of your YouTube video and all the bells and whistles. You also get the embed code if you want to embed it into a website or web service (say Edmodo) and you also get a shortened URL link that takes you to the new and improved video as well. Here’s what you can look forward to. Notice all the new features at the bottom?

So I guess that about wraps it . . . wait . . . there’s another feature. Another little tidbit that I would like to share to you. This is for students learning English (or really just anybody). The have a service that lets you type in any word and it will find a YouTube video that uses that word so you can hear how it is pronounced and how to use it properly. Yeah, pretty cool huh?

You have to look a little to find this feature though. So here is what you do. Go to the embedplus homepage and scroll to the bottom. You will see the link for it there. Check out the image below to get a clearer idea.

From there it will take you to a page where you type in the word you want to search for. In my case I typed in technology. When the page comes up it will speak the word and show you if there are any YouTube videos where the word is used. If you watch the video, it will automatically go to the point in the video where the word is being used, so one can hear how it is spoken (again) and how it is used in context. Pretty handy huh. It is sort of like an online dictionary but better.

Below the videos you will find more examples and resources on the word.

*If you notice something weird with the image, that is due to my screen capture program, not embedplus.

Wrapping things up

Well that about sums it up . . . for real this time. 🙂 If you’re looking to trim a YouTube video go to TubeChop, it’s faster and easier. If you’re looking for a way to leave annotations, trim, zoom in, or have the ability to replay or more than embedplus is your hands down winner. It’s a weird website but it definitely has a value to people who find a lot of resources on YouTube. Check it out for yourself.

www.embedplus.com