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I just got a Flip Mino HD to play with and am thinking of doing some video on the upcoming trip to Spain like I did in Belgium over Christmas. My first thought was to simply host the videos on my web site and embed them. I had this working more or less with the Podpress plugin but for some reason it’s gone all wonky on me.
In my search for options I found a variety of plug-ins for self hosting video, but they are convoluted and not one offers what I really need.
The other option was to upload to one of the video sharing sights and snag the embed code for publication here at baldheretic.com. Youtube doesn’t allow you to embed the HD version of your video into your own blog so that’s a waste. I was turned on to Vimeo by John Winters (aka @obscura) and it is impressive. The problem is that you are only allowed to upload 500mb a week, which is fine but they only allow ONE HD upload a week which is not so great. You can upgrade to Vimeo Plus for a fee of $59.95 a year. This account allows for 5 gigs of uploads in a week and unlimited HD uploads are included in that.
Kind of overkill for my purposes and too pricey.
I also checked out Flickr Video which is available to Pro account holders like myself, but they limit your videos to 90 seconds with no option to go longer. The call it “a long photograph.”
In my quest I stumble upon a post by WordPress founder Matthew Mullenweg where he was showing off a movie made from tilt-shift photos he had taken.
Doing a little digging I found out that if you have a pemium account at wordpress.com you can upload videos of many different formats and the site will crunch and convert and allow you to embed them rather seamlessly. The premium account is only $20 a year for 5 gig of storage. The cool thing is that once you upload the video you can then grab the embed code and place it in the blog of your choice making this a reasonable alternative to Vimeo for me personally.
It irks me that this functionality is not available for those of us who self host our own WordPress blogs. I suspect it has do with whatever is needed on the back end to process the videos, but still. I bet it could be implemented without much fuss. We’ll see what comes down the pike in the future.
In the mean time I have paid Mr. Mullenweg his thirty pieces of silver and acquired the upgrade. I do like the quality of the video.
If Matt reads this I would like him to know that donated wordpress.com account to Technology Bytes would be a tax write-off. Just wanted to put that out there.
Pingback:Embedding WP.com Video — Matt Mullenweg
ahh, I was wondering how you could start using the WP video service, thanks for the tip. I like it as an option too, looks good, but needs much better wp.org integration.
I want to create a video flash player on my site and the queue all my videos into a folder and then play them from that location
Hey! thats the post where i asked Mate about the video embedding for the WordPress video player.
it is a great player and the paid options sound just like what you say you need.
I saw your comment on Ma.tt’s blog. I would love to see the ability for self hosted WordPress (Capitalized correctly 4 Matt) to one day have the ability to convert video files to flash to be posted. Until then poor old me will have to stick to free vimeo for my video posting needs. Good post still.
Check out http://www.streamincloud.com/. You get an Amazon S3 account, upload your files there, and their service will automatically convert your stuff to Flash for easier browser viewing. Then you can just use the FlowPlayer in your blog entries pointing to your videos in S3.
I’ve been hosting videos on S3 for a few months at SQLServerPedia.com, and it’s been really cost-effective. I get around 15k views per month, and it costs about $20.
Your solution does look good though, until we get the WordPress Video Solution Framwork on self hosted blogs. Thanks for the tip! I think it’s definately worth $20 a year 🙂
Your solution does look good though
🙂
Actually Automattic released the code that drives the video service at wp.com.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpresscom-video-server/
As noted though, it’s not an actual plugin, requires a fair amount of work to get it to function and is more for WordPress Multiuser installs than stand alone wordpress blogs. Additional servers are also a plus.
There’s been some work made on the code over on the wpmu forums:
http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=10778
regards,
-drmike
Why you don’t use YouTube and their service?