I was looking for a simple media player that could play videos that I had created at home. One of the great things about Magix Movie Edit Pro is that you can output your finished masterpiece in MP4 or FLV format. Which is great as it keeps the file size small and enables me to share my videos to family members across the world.
Problem was I just couldn’t find a simple plugin for WordPress. There are many out there, mostly for embedding videos from external locations such as YouTube or Google Video, but not easily from the local file server, you have to specify the full URL. Also, I didn’t want to keep remebering all the different parameters that needed to be set for each video, there may be months between video posts, no way I can remeber all the settings!
So, I decided to write my own simple WordPress plugin using Flowplayer. The plugin adds flowplayer to the WordPress blog, it comes pre-configured and is very very easy to use. All you need is the name of the video and it’s resolution (width and height).
The plugin comes with flowplayer version 3.1.0 which is able to play the following formats;
- H.264
- FLV
- MP4
It is supported by the folowing browsers;
- Internet Explorer 6.0+
- Firefox FF 2+
- Safari 2.0+
- Opera 9.0+
The plugin has the following features;
- Graphical add button (Visual Editor)
- HTML add button (HTML Editor)
- Very easy to use
Installation
Upload the wp-flowplayer directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Usage
Upload your video to /wp-content/videos/.
Create a new post/page and click the flow button (in either Visual editor or HTML editor) and replace the prefilled parameters with your video specific information.
For example this entry;
flow href="myvideo.mp4" width="320" height="240"
would add the video myvideo.mp4 with the width 320 and the height 240 to your post.
Screenshots
Download
Download the wp-flowplayer plugin and install using the instructions above. If you have any issues please contact me and let me know.