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Adding a feature to a site requires some investigation into community interest and to use cases. Here's a successful example. In that case the feature was MathJax and the issue was load time and server overhead or something to that effect. It took about 16 months!

I'm wondering if there is interest in adding the ability to view in-line YouTube videos to posts here in Astronomy SE? There is a certain level of parity between Space SE and Astronomy SE and I'm always surprised when embedded videos show there but don't show here. Latest example, probably not the best use case though

I'm curious if there is any interest in looking into adding the YouTube viewer here. Since it seems it can take a long time to do this, consider that we're talking about how we envision the future of the site and the field of Astronomy, and the astronomical data and content available in the future, and not only experience in the past.

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    $\begingroup$ @called2voyage We can turn this on but it'd really help if we had some great examples of times this would be beneficial to the answers on the site. There is always some concern with abuse and a lot of dead links since YouTube sometimes unexpectedly removes videos. This can be damaging to your content if the answer relies only on the video with no additional content, the answer becomes useless if the video dies. $\endgroup$
    – Catija
    Sep 1, 2020 at 14:37
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    $\begingroup$ @Catija We would not allow video-only or video-reliant answers. Videos would be for supplementary purposes only, as described in my answer below. We can definitely compile a list of example cases, if that would be helpful. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Sep 1, 2020 at 14:49
  • $\begingroup$ @Catija I started a community wiki answer of example cases below. You can see there are already quite a few. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Sep 1, 2020 at 14:56
  • $\begingroup$ @Catija I've added to c2v's list. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Sep 1, 2020 at 16:43

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UPDATE: It has now been enabled on the site.


I'm going to hazard a guess that since this has a net score of 10 currently, which is an ample amount for Astronomy meta, the community is generally interested in this.

I could see it being useful in some cases as a visual aid for things that can be kind of hard to envision from a textual description, especially where a novice might not know what is being described in technical terms and a simpler explanation would require a lengthy detour from the main text.

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  • $\begingroup$ If you update to mention this has been implemented (yay!) I can accept. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Dec 30, 2020 at 21:36
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Examples where YouTube viewer would be helpful:


For at least half of these posts I would not have used the embedded video player because users here enjoy a clean look, but for some of them I've had to resort to screenshots or GIFs of the videos which is not ideal. In those cases an embedded viewer in a post would have been preferable. I haven't checked all of these but out of about 20 I did check I only found one that ESA had removed from their YouTube channel (the ESPRESSO spectrometer for some reason)

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