‘Insert into Post’ grayed out

Can you be more specific about your workflow? What buttons exactly are you pressing to get to which “add media” screen? Usually you wouldn’t have to go to any special add media screen since my plugin just modifies the WordPress add media popup. Are you using the “Embed video from URL” button because your videos aren’t in the WordPress Media Library?

Thanks for the fast response, Kyle! Yes, my videos are not in the WordPress Media Library, but instead are ordinary web links. Am I misunderstanding the purpose of your plugin?

My workflow basically is this:
1. In the WordPress Dashboard, click “Add New Post” — or choose “All Posts” and select an existing post to edit
2. within the “Edit Post” screen, click the button at upper left labeled “Add Media” (just above the main window for adding text and script to a page or post)
3. In the WordPress “Add Media” screen, click the link in the left sidebar labeled “Embed Video from URL” — this link appears when your plugin is activated, and does not appear when the plugin is not activated.
4. In the screen titled “Embed Video from URL” that the link goes to, paste into the second line (labeled “Video URL”) the URL to a video from either my own site, or from another site, such as:
[video src="https://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/BigBuckBunny_320x180.mp4" /]
or
https://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/big_buck_bunny_1080p_stereo.ogg etc.

I can also email you links to a couple of my own hosted .mp4 files if you like.

I’d expect the “Insert into Post” button at the bottom of the “Embed Video from URL” screen to become active when I enter a video URL into the “Embed Video from URL” page, but instead it remains grayed-out. That remains the case no matter what else I do either on that screen (e.g., type a title, change dimensions) or on either the “General” or “FFMPEG Settings” tab of the plugin’s defaults screen (whether accessed either from the links on the setup page, e.g. the one labeled “default dimensions” or from the WordPress Dashboard’s Settings section directly).

Am I misunderstanding the purpose and use of your plugin, or encountering some sort of incompatibility? FWIW, I’ll mention here that I’ve also tried this now on the host I’m moving to, InMotion, and the one I’m moving away from in a week or so, GoDaddy.

Many thanks.
Jim

I’m guessing this isn’t quite the plugin I’m looking for. As you’ll have gathered from my previous posts, I’m looking for a way to add self-hosted .mp4 videos to the WordPress Media Library selection screens, without their needing to be uploaded directly into the wp-content/uploads/ dated folders where WordPress wants them to be. Somehow I’d got the idea that your “Embed video from URL” feature would do this, so had posted when I couldn’t get that to work.

In case anyone else here might have a similar need, I have found another plugin that does this pretty well. It’s “External Media Without Import” v.1.0.2.1, which was last updated just a month ago.

I’ll mention here a little about my use for this, in case Kyle or others might have alternative suggestions. I’m developing a course in an learning management system for a small number of users, with about 8 – 10 hours of video content — a couple dozen videos, each in a couple of different resolutions, adding up to about 10 gb in all. I’m using a page builder (Elementor) whose widgets aren’t good at treating ordinary URLs as video sources, and so my choices are basically to upload those videos to Youtube or Vimeo, or get them into the WordPress Media Library. Particularly while I’m developing, I’m spinning up multiple installations of WordPress, and so don’t want to have to load separate copies of those mp4’s into each installation. As my intended user base is small and I don’t want the videos public beyond the LMS, I’m also not interested in putting these up on youtube or vimeo, etc., if I can help it.

Beyond that, I’ve been able to point the Elementor widgets and other resources in my LMS to server-maintained shortlinks to my video files, that I’ve created using the yourls package on my hosted server. This has given me additional flexibility to populate the widgets, etc. with the shortlink URLs, so if need be I can change out those source video files without needing to recode throughout the LMS. The “External Media Without Import” plugin is able to treat those server-side shortlinks the same as the original files they point to, for purposes of constructing entries in the WordPress Media Library that just work.

Kyle, thanks so much for your great work on Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator, and your very active ongoing support for it. I noticed in your sticky thread that you’re considering updating the plugin with some paid features. If implementing something like External Media Without Import has got is beyond the scope of your free version, you might want to consider implementing similar functionality into a pro feature set.

Jim

Yeah, it sounds like what you want to do doesn’t require my plugin at all. And if External Media Without Import works and is available for free, I don’t think it would be fair for me to re-create that functionality in a premium plugin.

But for what it’s worth if you’re including a full shortcode like [video src="https://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/BigBuckBunny_320x180.mp4" /] in the URL field, that would explain why the “Insert into Post” button remains grayed out. To use that function there should only be a URL in that field, with no shortcode or anything else around it.

Thanks Kyle. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t wrapped that Big Buck Bunny mp4’s URL in a wordpress video shortcode in my forum post. I certainly didn’t do that in the dialog screen for your plugin. I’m wondering if this help forum’s software might be set to automatically add that bit of code when it sees an .mp4 URL on a line by itself. Just for fun I’ll try that again now, comparing what happens when I again paste the bare URLs for mp4 and ogg versions of that public-domain animated film:

[video src="https://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/BigBuckBunny_320x180.mp4" /]
vs.
[audio src="https://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/big_buck_bunny_1080p_stereo.ogg" /]

In any event, and for whatever reason, I’ve had no success getting the “Insert into post” button on the “Embed Video from URL” dialog screen, accessed from the Media Library link that appears when your plugin is active, to un-dim and become clickable. And as I think I made pretty clear from my earlier posts, I’ve done just about anything I can on that — with fresh WordPress installs, on 2 different hosts even. Either there’s something incompatible between your plugin and WordPress 4.9.5, or my luck’s just plain bad. Have you tried this combination yourself, to confirm that it does work?

Thanks anyway.
Jim

Now that’s funny. Not only did the forum software wrap the .mp4 URL in a video shortcode, it also wrapped the .ogg URL in an audio shortcode — presumably it hadn’t done that in my previous note because I had “etc.” on the same line as that URL then. Live and learn.

Jim

Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I had tried it before and it worked and I wanted to test it on a fresh install and the Insert into Post button doesn’t remain grayed out after I enter the Big Buck Bunny URL or any URL. I tried it with Elementor active as well. Do you have .htaccess password protection or anything else like that which could somehow interfere with the JavaScript that controls that screen?

Hiya

get it greyed out also and I’m using a YouTube link?

Nathalie

Yes, as I say in the FAQ, my plugin does not work with YouTube or Vimeo or any similar video hosting site.

I’m having the exact same issue as @jimbuell. I even tried https://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/BigBuckBunny_320x180.mp4 and the Insert into Post button remains grayed out.

Hi @jimbuell

I have the same situation with yours for my LMS configuration. Been 3 weeks looking for the working solution and found this thread.

If I may ask jimbuell:
1. What media server are you using? I’m using NextCloud for holding my video files (set X-Header option to allow-from https://www.mylms,com)

2. How you embed the media or link from the External Media Without Import plugin into post/page? Mine is just a hyperlink, no embed video nor a place holder.

Appreciate your help

Meanwhile, I have the same issue with the Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator plugin. The Post button is greyed out.

I can’t find the Pro version of the Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator plugin. Any plan @kylegilman to include feature similar with External Media Without Import plugin?

There’s no pro version of the plugin. I’ve been busy with my day job and the premium project is delayed indefinitely.

The External Media Without Import plugin already exists and appears to work, so I don’t plan to re-create it as part of my own plugin.

In the “Embed Video from URL” frame there is a validation script that runs after you enter a URL and if there is any text at all in the input field the “Insert into Post” button should then be enabled. If you can see any JavaScript errors in the web developer console that would help me a lot. Unfortunately they don’t show up in the main console. You have to switch the context from top to ‘media-upload.php’ because the whole form is in an iframe.

This is an old thread, but it’s a long-standing bug. I believe I got to the root of the problem causing the insert into post button to be grayed out and it should be fixed in today’s release, version 4.6.22