Easily Add Videos to Your WordPress Blogs

With the online video industry taking off, you may want to know some easy ways to add video to your WordPress sites. There are several great WordPress plugins for adding video content to your blogs. In this guide I’ll go over:

* Adding your own hosted .flv videos to WordPress
* How to embed videos from video sites such as YouTube

Start adding videos to your WordPress sites today and read on…

Playing hosted flash videos

If you can create your own .flv videos, and would rather not host them on a third-party site, there’s no better plugin than FLV Embed. With this plugin you can add your video to a post or page with a quick tag. First you need to get the plugin from WordPress.org at install it through OneClick or manually.

Once installed and activated, you’ll be able to configure the settings of the FLV player when it’s displayed on your blog.

In addition to setting options such as colors, you can also have your own logo embedded, have “Full Screen Mode” enabled, set the default volume, among other features you’d expect to see from a fully featured video plugin.

To display a video in a page or a post, you’d use a quick tag similar to the following:

[flv:/video/insidedwhs.swf 480 368]

The first option, currently your-video.flv, is obviously the name of the video in the path you set on the options page. You can also set it as a full URL. The optional-portrait.jpg is optional, and is what will show up as a “preview” before the video is played. The 2 numbers are width and height, respectively.

Embedding videos from other sites

Several popular video sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, IFILM, and others offer “embedding” code that will allow you to place a hosted video up for display on your own site, without sacrificing your own bandwidth resources. For WordPress, there is an easy plugin that you can use to embed videos in a similar “quick tag” format as above. It’s called Viper’s Video Quicktags.

Currently this plugin supports the following video sites:

* YouTube
* Google Video
* IFILM
* MetaCafe
* MySpace

These among other hosted video formats as well. You can get the plugin at WordPress.org. Once activated, you’ll see the options for the video sites on your post menu, which will prompt you for the video URL. It will generate the code in quick tag format to be displayed in your post.

As you can see, it’s a very simple format. All you need is the YouTube video URL. It’s a similar format for the other supported video sites as well.

Conclusion

If you post videos frequently on your blog I’d highly recommend these plugins, especially Viper’s for the quick tag post integration for all those video sites.