I am implementing a blog to share courses, lectures, tutorials or talks.
The video sizes might be bit a bit big – so i was wondering what is a good quality plugin for wordpress that would allow to play videos smoothly , with different dpi settings and such.
I want to host the files on my hosting – and play them.
Is that a bad option, should i go to youtube ? 3rd party ? what are the + and – of each.
Are there any copyright issues, limits, “fair usages”, forced ads ?
Any tips on the video thing is extremely welcomed.
I live in one of the top 5 countries with slowest internet, so optimizing this can be crucial.
Thanks for any advice you guys can share
Regards
I just finished a Wordperss site that had a similar need for playing video. I would recommend going the Youtube route. Youtube will handle hosting, file conversions and with iframe embedding you can be sure the most devices possible will see your videos.
On the WordPress side of the equation, there are many helpful plugins that work with Youtube. My personal favorite is Tubepress.
Tubepress is great for making a playlist of just a few specific videos, or showing an entire archive of videos in pagination style. The customization available for displaying videos inline or in modal made it an easy choice for my custom theme.
If you’re quite sure you’re up to the challenge of hosting, properly encoding and serving video on your own, I’d recommend a two front assault. Use Flowplayer as your easy-to-use Flash player for older browsers, and then embrace HTML5 for the newer browsers.
The best possible resource for all things HTML5 Video is Dive into HTML5
Are you planning on converting the videos to .flv yourself? If not I would go with youtube/vimeo etc, it’s easy to upload a video, get the embed code and job done.
If you have internal hosting (or better still a server and someone to manage it on the university network) then http://videopress.com/ might be worth a look.
I would suggest that you put your videos on Youtube & Vimeo or similar video hosting server. These server has the hardware and bandwidth to stream your movies.
IF you choose to host these videos on your own server, you should create custom post types – I think. I’m pretty sure I saw some tutorials on thos, but I can’t find it now.
But here are tuts for Custom Post types:
http://wpengineer.com/1969/impressions-of-custom-post-type
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-use-custom-post-types
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress
OR you can use a plugin like JW Player: http://www.tubepress.net/wp-jw-player
jwplayer is good for this;
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-flash-v5/15995/jw-embedder-reference-guide#levels
upload 1 or more different versions of a video and it will detect the users’ speed and select the appropriate quality.
also breaks down into html 5 for iphone/ipads too…
(try and avoid their wp plugin though as we’ve found it a bit dodgy and built it the player directly in our template)
Dc