When you want to jazz up your PDFs with some eye catching media, chances are you would think of embedding a Flash video file.
They offer a great way of presenting your content in an interesting manner whether it’s an interactive Flash game or a simple product demo.
What more could you ask for?
Well, in addition to Flash videos, you can now add YouTube videos to your PDFs.
A month ago, The PDF Developer Junkie Blog writer, Joel Geraci, developed a YouTube Widget for Acrobat that will let you stream YouTube videos straight from the site and into a PDF file that is opened in either Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader v. 9.0.
Why a special widget though? Doesn’t the Video Tool work?
According to the blog posting, “. . . the URLs for YouTube videos are not considered valid by Acrobat 9 because they do not point directly to the video file but to a script that loads the YouTube player instead.”
The widget, on the other hand works around this, letting you use the embed codes to add the YouTube video “to any PDF file just like you would with an HTML page.”
With the amount of YouTube videos online and the ease with which you can create your own, multimedia PDFs can get more personal, more creative, and less complicated.
Check out the posting for the download, some step by step instructions, and a few set up details you’ll need to address first. Geraci also provides an example file you can take a peek at before you start out on your own.
Oh, yes, the multimedia PDF just got better.
Enjoy!
