Quick tip with Markdown and oEmbed

I write nearly all of the posts on this post in Markdown - it's a nice midway point between plain text, which readable but very limited, and full on html, which is powerful, but comparatively horrible to read.

However, I could never workout how to embed media in Wordpress blog if the content is being passed through a Markdown filter.

Normally, you should be able to just add a direct link to the video, and it should be replaced with a video element rendered inline, but as soon as the Markdown filter gets involved things aren't so simple.

The solution as ever is embarrassingly simple

Not as simple, but still pretty simple it turns out, once you decide to actually look through the docs. The trick is to use a shortcode, like so, showing this demo of Ubuntu's new HUD for their forthcoming OS release in April:

  [embed]http://link.to.youtu.be/v=w_WW-DHqR3c[/embed]

And it works fine!

See?

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w_WW-DHqR3c[/embed]