Enhanced media player goodies like embedding have been slowly coming along, with a handy embedding option now available in the fancy version of the media player running on Commons. This lets you copy a bit of HTML you can paste into your blog or other web site to drop in a video and make it playable -- nice! Some third-party sites will also likely be interested in standardish ways of embedding offsite videos from Youtube, Vimeo, and other providers.
There's a lightweight standard out in the wild called oEmbed which I've previously worked with on StatusNet: identi.ca uses it to show thumbnails for flickr photos, youtube & vimeo videos, and other such things that get called out in posts. Basically it specifies a discovery system for automating the embedding process, so you can get a thumbnail image and/or inline player HTML fragment that fits a reasonable size.
http://oembed.com/ https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25854
I'm interested in bringing oEmbed provider and consumer support to MediaWiki, but there are a couple limitations: currently there's no exposed license metadata (highly desired for Wikimedia's usage, obviously) and cross-site embedding for videos currently requires the consuming site to either drop raw HTML into their site (dangerous!) or maintain a second domain for iframe content (difficult).
There's a discussion going on on the oEmbed list about updating the standard, so if any of you out there have an interest in the wonderful world of on-web media embedding and how we can make it work better for MediaWiki, do feel free to pop your nose in. :)
http://groups.google.com/group/oembed/browse_thread/thread/99ca7193a3c3c11f?...
-- brion