Videos

Pressbooks allows you to embed media directly into your book so that viewers don’t have to go to a new tab or window. View the video below to learn how to embed a video onto a textbook page.

See Embedded Media & Interactive Content in the Pressbooks User Guide.

YouTube

Many open textbook publications post videos on YouTube for embedding in a textbook. This is done for a few reasons:

1. YouTube is easy to use.
2. Videos on YouTube can be assigned a Creative Commons license.
3. YouTube ensures that videos exposure beyond the textbook in which they are embedded.

If you own the copyright for a video posted on YouTube intended for an open textbook, take steps to change the video’s licence from the default “Standard YouTube license” to the “Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).” (See How to Change the License of Your YouTube Video to Creative Commons.)

Not all videos from YouTube can be embedded into Pressbooks. YouTube videos have three privacy settings that account holders can select. Pressbooks can only embed videos set to “Public” (can be viewed by anyone) and “Unlisted” (can be viewed by anyone who has a direct link to the video). Videos that are set to  “Private” (can only be viewed by video owner) cannot be embedded into Pressbooks. (See How to Upload a Video to YouTube for instructions on how to adjust privacy settings while uploading a video.)

Videos grouped in a playlist on YouTube are designed to play continuously in sequence. To prevent rollover for an embedded video taken from a playlist, use the URL found under the Share link found above the video description box. Highlight the URL by double clicking the link, then copy the URL by right clicking on the link and selecting “Copy.”

Here is an example of an embedded video:

Video Captions

To ensure videos are accessible to all students, they must be captioned. For more information about video accessibility, see the “Multimedia” chapter in the Accessibility Toolkit.

When including videos in Pressbooks, there are a few options for adding captions to videos:

1. If the video is hosted somewhere else (like YouTube or Kaltura) and is being embedded in Pressbooks, you can caption the video from within that platform and the captions will be included when the video is embedded into Pressbooks. This is the easiest option.
2. If you are uploading a video directly to Pressbooks, you will not be able to caption the video within Pressbooks. As such, you have two options:
   1. Apply open captions to your video. Open captions are when the captions are actually a part of the video. They cannot be turned on and off. This can be done in video editors like Adobe Premier.

Audio

Audio files posted in a repository, such as Sound Cloud, can be embedded in Pressbooks the same way that videos are embedded—using a URL.

Here is an example of an embedded audio clip: