The Internet Archive is a non-profit website that archives websites as well as media such as film and video, and books online. They have a wide assortment of historical and cultural collections that can be a great addition to a WordPress.com website.
In this guide
To add a video, you will need to find the video’s information page on The Internet Archive. For example, here’s a great 1950’s era video: http://archive.org/details/Wonderfu1958
To insert that video into your site, grab the filename from the URL, which is the final part of the web address:
Wonderfu1958
You can find the file name in your browser address bar, as follows:

Then you can create a shortcode using the format below, and adding in the filename:
[archiveorg id=Wonderfu1958]
You can add the shortcode to any page or post using a shortcode block.
You can specify the width and height of the embedded video by adding:
width=x height=y
to the shortcode, where the x and y are replaced with pixel dimensions for height and width. If you leave those blank, the video will automatically adapt to your theme’s content length and give you preferred dimensions.
For example, this shortcode:
[archiveorg id=Wonderfu1958 width=320 height=240]
produces this size video player:
As you can see, that is is narrower and shorter than the default embed without width & height option settings:
- To start at a certain point in the video, convert the time of that point from minutes and seconds to all seconds, then add
"&start="
+ the number as shown (using an example start point of 1 minute 15 seconds):[archiveorg id=Wonderfu1958&start=75]
- To specify a start and end time for a video, do the same as the above but add the end time (
"&end"
)as shown:[archiveorg id=Wonderfu1958&start=75&end=85]
- To make the video automatically start playing when someone visits your site, add
"autoplay=1"
to your shortcode:[archiveorg id=Wonderfu1958 autoplay=1]