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We have been out of town for a few days, and come back to find the YouTube embedded player no longer works the same.

Check out their samples, you will see they do not work as they say. They do work if you click on the “Menu, so it appears they have given in a bit to some of the complaints.
They did update their blog, here is what they say. But there is no mention of why it was changed.

Thanks for all the feedback - please keep posting your constructive comments here, as this is a huge help for us in gauging community needs. The designers are continuing to evolve the embedded player to address some of the concerns raised here while still providing new ways for people to discover videos. You may have already noticed the following changes: related videos only show when the menu button is pressed, mouseover function is no more, and the menu for related videos now displays at the end of the video you’ve just watched.

You’ll see more changes coming up which will allow deeper customization of the embedded player — whether you want the “classic” single video playback or some great new ways to display a variety of videos on your website, profile page or blog. Bottom line: we want this new feature on embeds to work for you.

If you’d like to turn off the option to see related videos through your embedded player, simply add “&rel=0″ after the video ID number in the embed code. Here’s an example of what your embed code should look like if you’d like to turn off this feature:

<object width=”425″ height=”350″><param name=”movie value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxx&rel=0” ></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=” http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxx&rel=0” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”350″></embed></object>

Cheers,
YouTube Team

Guess we will have to wait a few days to see if they settle on this setup or make some other changes. The cool part is that after the first changes are finalized they promise us folks different ways we can embed related videos. For example decided which related videos we want to show. Like other videos form a specific blog, web page or even keyword.