RSSHosting Your Own Videos With WordPress
By Ryan Ward | May 2, 2008
O.K. this isn’t the absolute best video in the world, but, it was my go at it. I think you can see that with some care, the videos will be quite sharp with proper lighting and setup. What I wanted to do was to find a way to take my own videos, host them locally on my computer and play them on my websites with my own video player. The other goal was to be able to create something that had better quality than what we see on youtube. We should still upload them to youtube and Google video, but, self hosting allows for more control with a personal video player that is a free plugin for WordPress. This much was a success. Getting there, well, like all of this for me…not so easy. Here is the video of a listing that I have that will be promoting in one of the markets I serve, Roswell real estate, and below is how you can do it.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Get this video. Copy and paste the code below.
<embed src="http://www.realestatetestblog.com/wp-content/plugins/flash-video-player/mediaplayer/player.swf" width="320" height="280" bgcolor="000000" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars="file=http://www.realestatetestblog.com/videos/Northcliff.flv&plugins=embed-1"></embed>
O.K. the first thing you need is a WordPress video player like this one. It’s a plugin like the rest so follow the install directions. Now you have only just begun so bear with me…
Next you need a video. My problem was that I had a dvd camcorder and let’s just say you can’t use one and leave it at that. So, I got a DV camcorder and shot a video and downloaded it to my computer. Next it was off to Windows Movie Maker for some quick editing. There are movie editing programs superior to Movie maker, but, I am still researching them. Anyone with any ideas or suggestions, I’d love to hear them. The problem was that I then ended up with an .avi file after editing and publishing the movie so I needed to get an avi to flv converter which I got from koyotesoft from download.com before uploading to my server.
That’s it for this one. The player is very customizable, but, follow the documentation they provide - not what I say! Time to go sell some real estate!
One more thing; somewhere in the documentation it says that you cannot place the video in a sidebar - that it must be in a post or on a page. That is not exactly the case. I have added this video to my Atlanta Blog in the sidebar by viewing the source code and pasting it into a div element that makes it look a little more like a TV. The only thing you need to know is that you cannot play the video in the sidebar if you also have a self hosted video in a blog post on the same page.
Category: Testing |
February 14th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
[...] in May of 2008, I started to play around with a video plugin for WordPress where I created my virst video. The quality of that video was poor and although I really liked the idea of self-hosting videos [...]