uploading videos to wordpress

November 25, 2008 6:36 AM

Wordpress filter: I was trying to upload a video for display on a wordpress blog directly from my hard driver (as opposed to via youtube). Doesn't seem to be working. Anyone know any tricks? And as it happens, I tried uploading the video to youtube, but got a more low-res version than I'd like — any tips there?
posted by dearleader to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Personally, when I have a video I want to look "good" (let's be honest, Youtube videos look terrible) I use vimeo.com. They have an embeddable video player just like youtube, but the videos looks soooo much better, and people viewing them doesn't waste bandwidth on YOUR server.
posted by jwhowa at 7:09 AM on November 25, 2008

Agreed with jwhowa--it's a lot easier to let a third-party service host your video. If you want both Windows and Mac users to be able to reliably view it, it's got to be in Flash; this means that to host it yourself, you have to find and configure an embeddable Flash player and transcode your video to FLV format. A third-party host takes care of all this for you.

Youtube is supposed to be slowly phasing in high-def video, but I don't know where they are with that, or if they allow an individual user to specify whether a given video should be treated as high-def or not. I'll second the vote for vimeo.com (I have no content hosted there, but their videos do look good compared with Youtube.)
posted by [user was fined for this post] at 7:25 AM on November 25, 2008

Another good high quality video host is Blip.tv.
posted by yellowbinder at 8:43 AM on November 25, 2008

check out the video embed plugin for wordpress:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embedded-video-with-link

you can upload and host yourself or embed rather easily.
posted by pinto at 10:43 AM on November 25, 2008

Do you have write access to your wp-content folder?
posted by Solomon at 2:41 AM on November 26, 2008