I wanted to just add a short video to one of my blog posts – it’s not worth posting it on YouTube as it’s only a few seconds long – I just wanted to show where to find a particular option within wordpress.
I thought it would be just like adding an image. Wrong!
Apparently the ‘upload/insert video’ option doesn’t do what I want it to – no video gets inserted just a bit of text. So I went off to search Google and found that I need to use a plug-in to do this.
I’ve used podPress which actually does much more than just let you add video to your blog posts. Not surprisingly you can run podcasts and even set up how your screen will look in iTunes. But back to my video…
podPress turns out to be really easy to use:
- Download the podPress plug-in, install it and activate it within your admin area
- Upload your video file to your server – mine’s an MP4 but the plug-in supports many formats
(You can use the standard ‘upload/insert video’ option within wordpress to do this if you can’t be bothered switching between WP and your FTP software – just copy and paste the file URL to notepad) - Upload an image that you want to appear as the preview before the video starts to play
(As above, you can use the standard upload function to get the image onto your server – just click ’save all changes’ and NOT ‘insert into post’) - Go to edit the post you want the video to appear in and at the bottom of the screen you’ll see the podPress options
- Click the ADD MEDIA FILE option and type in the URLs of your video and image files
- Add the code, shown in the video below, to your post where you want the video to appear (I can’t write the exact code here as it embeds the video instead!)
- Hit save
- Voila!
And here’s a video I made ealier to show you how to embed a video in your wordpress blog using podPress!
Here’s instructions from another blogger detailing how to embed a video that’s posted on YouTube: How to Add Video to a WordPress Blog Post the Easy Way
