Video Blogging

[ryanhellyer]

There is a plethora of video plugins for WordPress which allow you to include videos on your blog. Some allow you to display videos from external sources such as YouTube while others allow you to include your own videos on your site.

The WordPress editor behaves oddly when you try to include HTML, and you often have to recode the HTML whever you want to edit a page which contains (for example) a YouTube video. This can be very infuriating and the use of a video plugin can help this problem enormously.




My favourite plugin for displaying external videos (such as YouTube) is the Viper Quicktags plugin, this allows you to display videos from a bunch of different sites. Here's a run down on the plugin from the official WordPress.org plugins site:

Viper's Video Quicktags

... click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box -- easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, alignment on the page) and much more.

For uploading my own videos, I use the Embedded Video with Link plugin. If your video isn't already an FLV, you will need to convert it to one before uploading as this plugin can not automatically convert it for you. The best software I've found for converting to FLV format is the Riva Video Encoder which has many options for compressing your video file. The plugin also allows embedding of external videos, although I find it isn't quite as good for this task as the Vipers Quicktag plugin. Here's a run down on the plugin from the official WordPress.org plugins site:

Embedded Video with Link

... made for easily embedding videos into a blog post. The videos can be integrated from external portals (like YouTube, Google Video and many many others) or they can be uploaded to the web server or a remote server and integrated as well. Additionally a corresponding link to the video on the particular video portal page or a download link to the local file can be generated automatically, if demanded ...

[ryanhellyer]

I've done some more hunting for video plugins. I haven't tested most of these, but if you any experience with them I'd love to hear what you think of them - or any other video plugins I may have missed.

Daiko's Video Widget
WordPress › Daiko's Video Widget « WordPress Plugins

Adds a sidebar widget to display random videos of your own choice. You can mix Google, Myspace and YouTube videos.

Smart YouTube Plugin
WordPress › Smart YouTube Plugin « WordPress Plugins

... allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in both your post and in RSS feed.

Gecko Tube
WordPress › Gecko Tube « WordPress Plugins

... allow users to easily embed YouTube videos using the URL of the video in the same manner as on WordPress.com. As a bonus, a link to the video is included in the RSS feed for feed readers that disallow embedded content.

Flash Video Player
WordPress › Flash Video Player « WordPress Plugins

... allows the addition of video (and other media) to a WordPress website using standards-compliant markup and the leading open source software (Jeroen Wijering's FLV Player and Geoff Stearns' SWFObject Javascript Library). A full options menu is available with post-level overrides for endless customization ...

VideoWarrior
WordPress › VideoWarrior « WordPress Plugins

... allows to include Videos from Youtube and Google very simple and it keeps your RSS-Feed valid.

vPIP
WordPress › vPIP « WordPress Plugins

... lets you design where the video should play on your blog with an image or text link. Then when the viewer clicks on the link, the vPIP javascript code embeds the video. A button below the videos allows it to be shared continually from site to site.

Revver Video WordPress Plugin
WordPress › Revver Video WordPress Plugin « WordPress Plugins

Allows you to display Revver videos on your site.

Embed QuickTime
WordPress › Embed QuickTime « WordPress Plugins

... helps you embed QuickTime movies to play directly in your posts, instead of redirecting your video to a separate page or forcing you to embed a video using Flash. It changes regular image links to the embedded QuickTime video when they are clicked. It works with .mov, .mp4 and .m4v files.

WP-Vidavee
WordPress › WP-Vidavee « WordPress Plugins

... a plugin that facilitates the uploading, management, and presentation of your videos to your bloging audience. By providing an interface that integrates with a remote transcoding, storage and serving infrastructure, your videos are uploaded within your own WordPress administrative console and markup tags are generated to playback the videos from vidavee.

Berri Youtube Gallery
WordPress › Berri Youtube Gallery « WordPress Plugins

... gives you possibility to show a YouTube video gallery with customized appearance on your sidebar and all you need is to write the video URLs in the widget control panel. There is no need to register or to get YouTube API. Easy to customize and you can insert an image in the video thumbnail.

[BigAlReturns]

Thanks for a great list Ryan!

[duellevel]

Nice list!! I will need some of this in the future

[sahara4]

I use the Embedded Video with Link plugin. If your video isn't already an FLV, you will need to convert it to one before uploading as this plugin can not automatically convert it for you. The best software I've found for converting to FLV format is the Riva Video Encoder which has many options for compressing your video file. The plugin also allows embedding of external videos, although I find it isn't quite as good for this task as the Vipers Quicktag plugin. Here's a run down on the plugin from the official WordPress.org plugins site