YouTube recently suspended Donald Trump's channel because of a video he posted. I was curious and wanted to know exactly what he said. Unfortunately, YouTube removed the video so I couldn't watch it there.

I searched for it using Google. I found many news articles describing the circumstances surrounding the suspension, but none of them included the video itself. In my experience, news articles are often a little off and I like to get as close to the source as possible. I used another search engine called Qwant for the first time and I found a news article from a foreign organization which included the video.

After watching the video, I believe that the statement which triggered the video's removal is that the recent US election was fraudulent. I think it's very useful to be able to see the video itself and not just a second-hand description. I also think that everyone who wishes to should be able to watch it.

YouTube videos are integrated with many platforms. For example, Hashnode has made it very easy to embed a YouTube video in the article you are reading now. But the video in question is not available on YouTube, so how did I embed the video above?

First, I wanted to download the video and host it myself just in case the news organization decided to take the video down. So I looked at the news article's page source using my browsers developer tools, searched for "mp4" and found the url for the video. Then I went to the terminal and entered,

curl -O https://images.hamodia.com/hamod-uploads/2021/01/WhatsApp-Video-2021-01-06-at-11.24.16-PM-1.mp4

I decided to host it using an AWS S3 bucket. I opened up the AWS console in the browser, created a new bucket, uploaded the video file, and marked it as public.

Next, I looked at the embedding options available with Hashnode. As far as I know, it's not possible to embed a video directly. But embedding CodePen examples is supported, so I just needed to create some HTML which shows the video.

<video width="700" controls>
  <source src="https://forbidden-video.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/WhatsApp-Video-2021-01-06-at-11.24.16-PM-1.mp4" type="video/mp4">
  <source src="https://images.hamodia.com/hamod-uploads/2021/01/WhatsApp-Video-2021-01-06-at-11.24.16-PM-1.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

As you can see, it doesn't take much HTML to show a video. I included two sources, the file I put in the S3 bucket as well as the file hosted by the news organization. That way, if one source is unavailable, the other one will be used as a fallback.

That's all folks! I hope you learned something and maybe you saw a video you hadn't seen before. If you'd like to share any thoughts, please leave a comment.