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A number of other sites - Gaming being the first - have the ability to embed YouTube videos in questions and answers.

I can see it being most useful in answers where we can post demonstrations of the techniques required to solve a particular problem.

If people think that it would be useful we can turn this into an official request.

If you have any specific examples of answers that would benefit from added video that would add weight to the request.

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    Would an answer containing only a video be an acceptable answer? We encourage users to supply more information when the answer only contains links, would this be the case for users only supplying a video? What happens if the answer only contains a video, and the video goes away? – Tester101 May 17 '12 at 17:07
5

While questions and answers in video format seems like a good idea, Google (or other search engines for that matter) doesn't index video content and as such, finding relevant information from a Google search would be greatly impeded. I don't come to any Stack Exchange website without a quick "Google" first and, usually, I find a close enough question to what I'm asking that has been indexed by Google. Video Q & A's alone would impact that capability.

If there was a narrative of the video in text that was enforced by policy, I would support this.

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    Oh yes. There should always be and actual question and answer on the site. We already require this for images and other links so the same rule would apply to video as well. – ChrisF♦ May 25 '12 at 7:33
4

Sounds great to me. Allowing video embedding just makes it easier to view what would otherwise be a simple link.

One example among questions I have up right now is What's the procedure for stripping wires with pliers?.

I would prefer users gloss videos with textual description as well, but I can't see any way to enforce that. I personally hate browsing to something and hitting a video wall of content that could just as well be presented in a less bandwidth- and time-intensive, more skimmable and searchable fashion.

3

If this is for somebody making a video for the question then yes, but I think our problem would be videos that cover way more than the question, or somebody advertising their products or services.

Also, gaming can probably get away with that because recording your desktop and making a video of a small part of a game is a lot easier than filming electrical, plumbing, carpentry or other things this site.

With that said I have along with lots others have linked YouTube to answers. Another plus for it would be that we would be keeping people on this sight instead of linking them off site. Too bad our links are not targeted to new windows (target="_blank).

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    Fair point about the advertising but I'm sure those questions / answers would get destroyed by downvotes and then closed pretty quickly. – UNECS May 16 '12 at 5:51
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    When embedding with YouTube, you can also specify where to start in the video, which could help to dig through the things that aren't relavant to the question. – cchana May 21 '12 at 6:52

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