How can I play a local video in my IPython notebook?

Question

(updated 2019, removed unnecessarily costly method)

Just do:

from IPython.display import Video

Video("test.mp4")

If you get an error No video with supported format or MIME type found, just pass embed=True to the function: Video("test.mp4", embed=True).

Or if you want to use the HTML element:

from IPython.display import HTML

HTML("""
    <video alt="test" controls>
        <source src="test.mp4" type="video/mp4">
    </video>
""")