YouTube

YouTube changed their embedded video thing to cause all videos to have an annoying "related videos" MTV style pop-up if you sneeze near your mouse during the playing of it. I noticed it this morning when looking at a video on Mindy's blog and immediately thought it was obnoxious. Since I try to restrain myself from ranting on other people's websites I thought I'd do it over here instead.

Take for instance this clip, an awesome 4 minute, one take steadicam shot from "The Protector":



See what I mean? Annoying right? It covers up half the action. It can be turned off by adding &rel=0 to the end of the URL but should surely be off by default. Here's the video with the pop-ups turned off.



It took me a little bit to figure it out because the instructions on the YouTube site are not clear. Basically in the embed code there are two references to the same URL, in the case above it is:
http://www.youtube.com/v/K06wDn3XsZE.
I changed both of these to be
http://www.youtube.com/v/K06wDn3XsZE&rel=0
and that turns it off.

The trouble is, since it's on by default, if you have a lot of embedded videos on your blog you're going to have to go and edit them all to add the &rel=0 or else you are stuck with YouTube's fuzzy matching that may offend your mum, or worse, presented with videos of someone else's kids, who are nowhere near as cute as your own family are in the video you just posted.

I don't think it's going to last very long, because it's a very un-Google move, but you never know. A feature, of no real value to the end user, added to a popular program, without consultation and confusingly hard to turn off, I mean, I know Google are trying to take on Microsoft, but turning into them isn't the way to do it.