‘Insert into Post’ grayed out

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

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="http://download.blender.org/peach/bigbuckbunny_movies/BigBuckBunny_320x180.mp4" /]
vs.
[audio src="http://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