YouTube - Audio Only
Sometimes, when you play a YouTube video, you're only interested in listening to the audio portion - for example, if you're listening to a song or some speech (talk radio, the President, whatever). In many cases, the YouTube recording doesn't really have a video portion to go with the audio, apart from a still image of the album cover or badly misspelled song lyrics. In cases like that, where you're only interested in the audio (and/or only interested in passing on the audio to other people), you can embed a YouTube file with the video excluded:
Click to viewThis also allows you to embed multiple songs without taking up a lot of screen space, like I did above. Below is the code for the first video. Note that I left the "full screen" button on the videos (the button on the right with four arrows) in case the viewer wants to see the video after all. If you want to remove that button, just replace both instances of fs=1 with fs=0 in the code below:
Note too that the string l-lJZiqZaGA (which also occurs twice) is the part of the code which identifies to YouTube which video to play. If you wanted to listen to a different video, such as the one below, you would replace both instances of that string with lQlIhraqL7o.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQlIhraqL7o
Finally, you can use the tip here to change the colors of the control bar.
EDIT from the FUTURE: Make sure that you change the 3 to 2 in all instances of ?version=3 (or &version=3 or &version=3) from the embed code to force YouTube to render the video in the older style if you want this to work (this comment was added in June 2012), as this trick is not compatible with the latest version of YouTube (which displays the top of the video, rather than the bottom with the control bar, when you do this). If you're editing old LJ entries to correct them by adding &version=2 to the old embed code, make sure that you also delete the tags to force LJ to accept the altered YouTube parameters. (You have to do this any time you edit an LJ post with embedded video if you're making changes to the video embed code.)