Embedding Video in Steemit

Having been on Steemit for less than a year one thing that continually amazes me is the lack of good documentation. Users will provide post describing how to do something trying to be helpful or you may stumble on information provided by Steemit, chances are both will be out of date. It would be a good idea if new features or revisions to features were not released until documentation on the new process was developed. This may mean some small group assigned mostly to only doing documentation or possibly the software developer would be forced to provide the updated documentation prior to the new release. Even as I write this, I realize this may actually be happening and I haven't stumbled on it. How about a nice big "HELP" button up there by the search, new post, and profile buttons?

My post yesterday, A November Norte, contained a couple of videos I wanted readers to be able to view while staying on the page. To me this is called "embedding" the video, but from my efforts not everyone has this definition of embedding a video. I quickly found that Steemit had no facility for uploading videos into the Steemit platform. After reading several post on the subject, I found the video already has to be online for it to be used within Steemit. The posts I read indicated it could be on Facebook, YouTube, or D-Tube and that all would allow you to embedd the video within Steemit. Trust me, this just isn't so.

First I uploaded my videos to Facebook which took about an hour. As it turns out Facebook doesn't provide the embed code needed to make it possible to place your video inside your Steemit post. Facebook does provide the video URL to make it possible to provide a link to the video, just no embedding.

The next attempt was to go to D-Tube knowing that many people on Steemit also use D-tube. So, I uploaded the videos to D-Tube, another hour of my life I will never get back. When I finally get the videos into D-tube, I find the same situation as Facebook. D-Tube also provides a link but no embed code for your post. What D-Tube will do is post your video automatically to Steemit with a link to the individual video once it is published, another surprise for me.

I then went on to YouTube and uploaded the videos expending another hour of my life. I had been able in the past to embed video from YouTube and knew this would work so I had some confidence here. YouTube readily provides the embed code by right clicking on the video and selecting the third option "Copy embed code". When pasted into your post the video magically appears. The website providing the video has to do something special to make it possible to embed the video and apparently Facebook and D-Tube don't do this. I tried replacing the video location in the code from YouTube with the Facebook location of my video and got an error back it was not supported.

This may not be the only way to get this done, but it's the first way I found that worked. After all, if you're looking for something it's always in the last place you look because it makes no sense to continue looking for it after you found it. As I write this I realize that since yesterday there could have been updates that would allow videos from Facebook and D-Tube to be embedded into Steemit posts. So here you have another Steemit user post providing information that could potentially be out of date by the time anyone reads it.

Steemit, how about looking into that big "HELP" button I suggested.