Without wanting to be a kill-joy, as I think for the most part it'd be pretty cool parsing the URLs to embed the clip in the page; I think there are downsides too...
...The main one being that it could affect the site's usability and performance - From the times the board seems to be busiest I think it's a fair guess that most of the Audi-obsessed petrol-heads on here spend waaay to much time larking about on an Audi forum on the internet than doing their actual job while they're at work (
) - but YouTube is picked up by any content filter worth its salt; and I'm willing to guess that there are just as many which will block any page with embeded content from YouTube than the number which just block (effectively blanking-out if you will) the embeded object; and I know for a fact that some of them will produce reports in the case of repeated attempts to view blocked content.
Also if you browse on a slower broadband connection, ISDN or Dial-up maybe (although I know this one is unlikely), GPRS etc. the site automatically starting to stream video content would impact browsing speed and potentially cost more money; if people browse by opening multiple browser tabs or browser instances it could be a real memory pig too - of course you'd need to try to avoid opening multiple video pages anyway as you can't watch them all at once, but you can see what I mean, that potentially it has other angles; and how much time does it realistically save? - The poster still has to enter an URL for the clip, and the reader saves one click per video - but possibly finds problems browsing at work (which I suppose I shouldn't really defend, but still...); or bandwidth problems if using a non-standard connection...
Like I say, I really don't want to be a kill-joy, as I'm probably one of the laziest people on the planet when I'm at home, and it's all good to come and check the site for a while with a nice cold drink/cigarette etc. in your non-mouse hand; and having the videos embeded in the page then would be really cool, but I just thought it worth noting that there are maybe other sides to it.
Regards,
Rob.
