Right now, if you’re using the VideoPress plugin on your self-hosted WordPress blog, you have to be signed in to your WordPress.com account to actually upload and work with your videos — not a huge deal, but not as streamlined as it could be.

Coming soon, that’s going to change: VideoPress is joining the Jetpack family, and will use the Jetpack API for authentication. (Yet another reason to install Jetpack if you haven’t already!)

What does this actually mean? In a nutshell:

• The current VideoPress plugin just provides you with an iFrame that opens up the WordPress.com video administration tools. You have to be logged in to WordPress.com to use it, and so do any other people who want to upload videos to your site.
• The Jetpack plugin hooks into WordPress.com, giving your self-hosted site access to sweet .com features like social sharing and tiled media galleries without having to be constantly logged in to WordPress.com. Jetpack takes care of all the authentication for you, so you can focus on your site.
• By making VideoPress part of Jetpack, we give it that same ability . You’ll be able to upload and work with video without being logged in to WordPress.com, because Jetpack will be your middleman.

Not only will this simplify the process of using VideoPress, it will also allow us to integrate VideoPress with the spiffy new Media Manager that shipped with WordPress 3.5:

If you use the VideoPress plugin, be sure to install Jetpack so you can take advantage of these improvements. Keep an eye on this blog and on the Jetpack Blog, and be the first two know when the VideoPress/Jetpack marriage is finalized!

As a blogger, you pore over your choices of words and images to make sure you’re communicating exactly what you intend to your readers. Why not add another tool to your arsenal? Using video can be an awesome way to illuminate, instruct, or just create a different kind of connection with your audience.

You might think that video is just for news sites or college kids with too much time on their hands.  Think again — video can be used to enhance your content in lots of ways:

• Were you going to include a photo gallery? Try video instead.
• Do you write a DIY or cooking blog? Host your own show.
• Mommyblogger? We’d love to see your rugrats’ antics.
• Write a travel site? Give us the flavor of the medina you just visited in Casablanca with a video tour.
• Use your blog as a journal? Try talking right to the camera to add a raw dimension to your musings.

Now that you can shoot high-quality video with a DSLR camera or mobile phone, the sky’s the limit. Heck, you can upload videos directly from your iPhone to your blog!

Once you have that perfect clip to push your post over the top, upload it right to your site with VideoPress, available both as a plugin for self-hosted WordPress.org sites and as an upgrade for WordPress.com sites. VideoPress is made to work with WordPress, so uploading couldn’t be simpler. And since you’re uploading the video right to your own site, there are none of the downsides of using a third-party video service: no ads, no maximum length for what you can upload, and best of all, no redirecting, so your readers start and end on your video and stay on your site the whole time.

Since VideoPress is an Automattic joint, you know the technical side (that is, the side you never have to worry about) is going to be clean and efficient. VideoPress automatically selects the best video player for your viewers. Readers see a preview, including a title and preview image, as the full video loads. The preview is lightweight and HTML-based, so the rest of your page loads with no lag time.

WordPress and VideoPress work together to make publishing online video easy as can be, so the only limit is what you can capture.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, otherwise known as the d.school at Stanford University, is an interdisciplinary program where graduate students from across Stanford learn to become innovators by tackling big challenges together.

To help encourage innovation and spread design thinking around the world, the d.school recently launched a prototype Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking which allows you to learn design thinking methodologies and sample what the d.school has to offer.

The crash course aims to help people to grow their own capacity to innovate, to experience a different way of working, encourage collaboration, a chance to do hands-on prototyping, and most importantly, help participants apply design thinking to their work and creative projects immediately after they complete the course.

Take the Crash Course

The Crash Course in Design Thinking has three parts:

• The Gear Up! Section lists the instructions required for the course.
• Go For a Ride! features the crash course video.
• The Chart a New Course section challenges you to apply your new-found learning to your work and creative projects.

We’re proud to say that the d.school chose VideoPress as a natural fit to display the video on the crash course site.

“VideoPress helped us easily get our videos up and running on our WordPress site with minimal effort in a short amount of time,” says Bruce Boyd, the d.school’s Director of Technology.

Open source heat map connects participants worldwide

The project offers an amazing open source heat map that has helped create a social connection among people doing the crash course around the world. When you click on the Crash Course video, you can select whether you want “check it out,” or “run a crash course.” If you say that you’re running a crash course, you’ll be asked for your name, email address, and the number of people taking the crash course. This information gets placed on a heat map where the size of the dots corresponds to the size of the group. Within 24 hours of launch, the reach of the virtual crash course extended across eight countries, which included a 400 person workshop in Perm, Russia.



This virtual creative learning experience was built to help scale the Design Thinking Bootcamp that’s also featured in the d.school’s Executive Education program. With a very lean team trying to accommodate a high demand for training in Design Thinking, Jeremy Utley (Director of Executive Education) and Scott Doorley (Creative Director of the d.school) developed an initial prototype of the video. Within a few months, and with a lot of aid from partners all over the world, a simple video turned into a plug-and-play virtual course, delivered to the world for free. As of this month, there have been close to 1500 participants, across 22 countries.

Go for a test drive: visit the Virtual Crash Course page.

Learn more about why VideoPress is the best way to upload video content to your blog.

The VideoPress plugin for WordPress now includes dynamic support for HTML5 <video> playback on devices incapable of Flash playback. Your videos are directly inserted onto your webpage alongside your other content: no iframes or other secondary content embeds necessary. The new VideoPress plugin for WordPress delivers faster load times, better playback experiences on more devices, and delivers even more accessibility and search engine friendly features.

HTML5 video

VideoPress automatically detects the playback capabilities of each website visitor and serves the most appropriate video player based on those capabilities, your publisher settings, and custom attributes you may specify with each shortcode. Visitors capable of Flash playback will see the VideoPress Flash player complete with HD switching and share options. Visitors capable of HTML5 <video> playback of MP4 (H.264, AAC) or Ogg (Theora, Vorbis) will see a browser-native HTML5 <video> player and controls.

VideoPress videos are first-class citizens of your webpage with support for custom layout, styling, and playback events tracked by your existing analytics providers. VideoPress will automatically light up third-party analytics software with support for HTML5 media events.

Authors can opt-out of the new dynamic player and force Flash by including shortcode attribute flashonly=true. Freedom-loving authors and publishers may continue to include only Freedom-loving formats through their site’s media settings or by including shortcode attribute freedom=true.

Faster load times

The VideoPress plugin for WordPress now includes a lightweight video preview before activating a full video player in response to a visitor’s click or touch. This two-stage approach delivers improves website load times and general responsiveness.

Introducing VideoPress for WordPress.com

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Search engine friendly

The VideoPress preview also provides more descriptive on-page markup for your videos, helping search engines and screen readers better understand your video content. Videos with associated transcripts, such as WordPress TV, include WebVTT data for display by supporting browsers.

Technical notes

The VideoPress plugin for WordPress supports WordPress 3.0 or later, including cache-awareness for multisite installs. Publishers who have customized their CSS around past VideoPress Flash markup will want to adjust their theme for the new video preview markup. We recommend clearing your site cache, if applicable, to take advantage of the new player. The VideoPress dynamic player chooses the best player at runtime, avoiding the need for a separate page cache for HTML5-capable browsers. The VideoPress plugin for WordPress integrate well with your existing cache setup.

Today VideoPress was upgraded to OSMF 1.6, bringing better performance, lower power usage and a couple of new features.

Performance

Adobe recently updated Flash Player to improve hardware-accelerated video decoding called StageVideo; VideoPress now takes advantage of the latest features of Flash Player for lower CPU and memory consumption in Adobe Flash Player 10.2 and above.

VideoPress uses Stage Video to split up video processing between multiple CPU cores, GPUs, and hardware decoders to improve video performance by up to 85% and decrease RAM utilization. For you, this means smoother video playback and lower power usage on netbooks, smartphones, tablets, and other low-power devices. Desktop playback will still deliver the same results great results you’re used to, now with fewer resources.

Features

The big new feature we’ve added today is progressive seek. Instead of having to wait for a video to download before you can jump ahead, VideoPress now supports seeking to any place in the video, without needing to load the entire video. This also means you can switch between HD and SD at any time and your video will continue playing from the same spot.

Finally, for those of you who use multiple monitors, VideoPress will now play nicely in full screen mode – you can play videos on one screen, and keep doing other things on the other!