LGF Pages continues to evolve: the new feature of the day is the ability to embed videos in your Pages from any video website (instead of being limited to YouTube, Vimeo, Liveleak, and Google).

To make this work, there's a new button in the LGF Pages bookmarklet that looks something like this:

(That's supposed to look like a miniature video player.)

Most video sites have a feature that lets you copy the embed code for a video to your clipboard, for pasting into a blog or other site. Here's an example of this code, copied from YouTube (with spaces inserted to prevent messing up the formatting):

<object width="480" height="385"> <param name="movie" value="[Link: www.youtube.com...] </param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"> </param> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/SrVzjMMaztw&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"> </embed></object>

When you click the "Embed Video" button in the LGF Pages bookmarklet, you'll be prompted to paste in the "Video embed code" from the video site. That's all you need to do.

The embed code will be converted (through the magic of regular expressions) into the special type of video link we use in the LGF Blog (to be compatible with the widest possible range of browsers), and inserted into your "Text" field at the point where you left the insertion cursor when you clicked the button. The inserted code will look something like this (this is the code for the Dana Carvey video I posted yesterday):

<div class="vcent"> <a class="media {width:512,height:328,type:'swf', params: {flashvars:'key=c550e56ad4', allowfullscreen:'true', allowscriptaccess:'always'}, flashvars:{key:'c550e56ad4'}}" href="[Link: player.ordienetworks.com...] </div>

That's all you need to know. Just click the button, paste in the video embed code, and your video will automagically appear in your Page when it's posted (or when you Preview).

I've tested this feature with many different video sites, and so far they all work (as long as they use <object> and <embed> tags and not Javascript or IFRAMEs -- see below); the only one that required some special code was Google Video (because they specify the width and height parameters with a "style" attribute).

Note: some websites, like Fox News and CNN, use a Javascript link (or an IFRAME) to embed video. This type of embed code will not work in LGF Pages -- you'll just get an empty string back. Here's an example of Javascript embed code from Fox:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=4215969&w=400&h=249"> </script> <noscript>Watch the latest news video at <a href="[Link: video.foxnews.com...] </noscript>