How to embed a video into GitHub README.md?

Question

Is it possible to embed a flash video into README.md on GitHub? It isn't showing up: https://github.com/mattdipasquale/PicSciP

Answer 1

I strongly recommend placing the video in a project website created with GitHub Pages instead of the readme, like described in VonC's answer; it will be a lot better than any of these ideas. But if you need a quick fix just like I needed, here are some suggestions.

Use a gif

See aloisdg's answer, result is awesome, gifs are rendered on github's readme ;)

Use a video player picture

You could trick the user into thinking the video is on the readme page with a picture. It sounds like an ad trick, it's not perfect, but it works and it's funny ;).

Example:

[![Watch the video](https://i.imgur.com/vKb2F1B.png)](https://youtu.be/vt5fpE0bzSY)

Result:

Use youtube's preview picture

You can also use the picture generated by youtube for your video.

For youtube urls in the form of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<VIDEO ID>
https://youtu.be/<VIDEO URL>

The preview urls are in the form of:

https://img.youtube.com/vi/<VIDEO ID>/maxresdefault.jpg
https://img.youtube.com/vi/<VIDEO ID>/hqdefault.jpg

Example:

[![Watch the video](https://img.youtube.com/vi/T-D1KVIuvjA/maxresdefault.jpg)](https://youtu.be/T-D1KVIuvjA)

Result:

Use asciinema

If your use case is something that runs in a terminal, asciinema lets you record a terminal session and has nice markdown embedding.

Hit share button and copy the markdown snippet.

Example:

[![asciicast](https://asciinema.org/a/113463.png)](https://asciinema.org/a/113463)

Result: