Using the Media Web Part in SharePoint 2010

This is just a little tip, but sometimes they are the ones that help people the most.

I was trying to figure out how to add the new SharePoint 2010 Media Web Part to a page. No matter where I looked in the list of available Web Parts, I just wasn’t seeing it. Blog posts from smart people like Chaks’ (@chakkaradeep) SharePoint 2010: Media Web Part and others said to simply add the Web Part to the page, configure it, and you’d be all set.

The missing piece was that you have to have the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure Site Collection feature activated. This feature is only available in SharePoint Server 2010, so you won’t see it in SharePoint Foundation 2010.image

Once you have the feature activated, you have two ways to use the Media Web Part.

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The first way is to insert the Web Part into a page from the ribbon. When you click the Video and Audio button on the ribbon, the Media Web Part is inserted into the page wherever you’ve left your cursor.

The second way is to edit the page and add the Web Part, exactly the way you add other Web Parts to the page.

Once you’ve followed either of the above steps either  you’ll be able to access the contextual buttons in the ribbon which let you set the properties of the Web Part.

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7 Comments

  1. Thanks Marc! I was digging around for this web part earlier today and found your post at the top of Google for “Media Web Part”. Good to know I’m not crazy and was just missing a feature activation.

  2. My publishing feature would not activate for anything, and wouldn’t deliver any useful diagnostic information. activating via command line informed me that there were “too many columns of the specified data type” which i suspect to be a bug after much internet searching. i used this command to activate anyway:

    stsadm -o activatefeature -name “PublishingSite” -url “http://sharepoint/site” -force

  3. hey Marc, great post to begin with. I have a typical requirement though. In my organization for the new people coming in we need to have a bunch of videos uploaded on a sharepoint 2010 site and for them to be able to view them all from just one webpart. Can i make that happen ? OOTB of course. thanks in advance.

  4. Marc,

    How do you get the media web part to display the next video in a list? I would like users to be given the next video in a series. But it seems the web part only plays the one to which it’s configured. Any ideas?

    1. pat:

      The Web Part doesn’t do that; it’s meant to display one file. You can use jQuery to show multiple multi-media files. There are some good plugins out there, and you can combine them with SPServices to read the info from a list.

      M.

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