It's a better idea for authors to give a link to the video, rather than embed it, I think, KM. That's what I've been doing. Being a dial-up user I know how long it takes to load even the shorter ones, so I have sympathy in that regards. I think folks with high-speed often loose sight of that. (Wishes I had that problem.) By offering the link I give folks visiting my site, or blog, the option of watching and waiting for the download, or not.

Ah! Good to know all this. I had dial-up till a few months ago, but I didn't visit any blogs back then which had embedded videos (wouldn't have been any point in doing so; it would have taken me forever to watch them), so I wasn't sure about the timing situation. These days I'm stealin-- *Cough, cough*, I'm borrowing wireless signals from my neighbors, so I couldn't check on the dial-up situation. I'll require that all embedded videos be placed behind lj-cuts. That way, the main page of the blog will be friendly to dial-up users. However, I'm going to continue to allow embedded videos, because some mature videos may be hosted in such a way that people who follow the direct link have to sign in to the hosting site. We had a case like that on this forum. I wanted folks to see a nice songvid at YouTube, but it was flagged at YouTube for adult content, so one of the members here, who wasn't a YouTube member, couldn't view it.