VideoPress

VideoPress has a new look! The VideoPress Flash player has been completely rewritten on top of the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). This new MPL-licensed framework led by Adobe provides common player functionality shared by most video players: play/pause, volume control, download progress, buffering, and more. VideoPress extends this shared foundation with custom skins, VideoPress-specific functionality such as video sharing and HD toggle support, and partner integrations including WordPress.com Stats, Quantcast demographics, and CDN providers. Partner integrations are much simpler through OSMF plugins offering advertising and analytics built by each potential partner.

The new VideoPress player replaces the Embed menu with a new Share menu. Your video’s WordPress Shortcode and HTML embed snippet are now hidden behind a copy-to-clipboard button. We have also exposed direct download links for the highest quality video available in MP4 (H.264/AAC) and Ogg (Theora/Vorbis) formats. These download links were previously hidden within your blog’s RSS feed, available to podcatchers such as iTunes and Miro or direct download from a feed preview screen. Your viewers now have the option to download a high-quality video for full-screen viewing in their favorite desktop video player or on a television. We have renamed our blog-level and video-level sharing preferences to reflect this change.

The new VideoPress Flash player includes support for the many written languages of the VideoPress community. Please visit our VideoPress translation page to help us support even more languages inside the VideoPress player.

We are excited by the new player foundation and opportunity for future expansion of video playback features and partners.

We’ve made some improvements behind the scenes with how we serve video files, and we’ve gotten a lot of postive feedback that it’s much faster for people now, that they can watch videos without any buffering or stuttering.

Cool.

So try it out. You can’t tell it from this blog, but we’re constantly making improvements and tweaks behind the scenes to make your video pressing experience as smooth as possible.

VideoPress is a strong supporter of free software, including video formats and codecs. All videos uploaded to VideoPress are available for download in Ogg video format with Theora video and Vorbis audio. If you blog on WordPress.com you now have the ability to restrict VideoPress embed to only free video formats unrestricted by known patent claims or intellectual property licensing hurdles.

Publishers concerned about the freedom restrictions of the default VideoPress player’s use of Adobe Flash, MP4, H.264/AVC High profile video, and AAC-LC can override the default behavior through their WordPress.com blog’s Media Settings page (yourblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-media.php). Your free software formats choice applies to all VideoPress videos embedded on your blog, including videos from other VideoPress publishers. Videos included in your posts and pages will be output using HTML5 <video> markup for playback using default video controls in supporting web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 3.5+, Google Chrome 3.0+, and Opera 10.5+.

The free formats setting may be expanded in the future to include additional formats free of known patent claims. The newly supported WebM file container with VP8 video and Vorbis audio is an early example of what could become a video format without known intellectual property claims prohibiting open distribution. We plan to add support for freedom preference for self-hosted WordPress blogs through our VideoPress plugin once we have tested this new feature with the millions of active blogs on WordPress.com.

We hope you enjoy your new choice in publishing video without sacrificing freedoms.

VideoPress helps your video content spread virally across the web through WordPress shortcodes and HTML embeds. We realize not every publisher would like to see his or her video spread across the web and offer two options to restrict distribution: no advertised embed method and restricting embeds to a specific domain. Publishers using the VideoPress plugin for WordPress may choose to restrict playback to just their blog domain.

Websites embedding restricted content will see the message displayed above, indicating video embeds are disabled for the given domain. Publisher may override this default behavior for specific domains through the media settings of the WordPress.com blog with a VideoPress upgrade.

Log in to the administrative interface associated with your WordPress.com blog to configure new settings for embeds across all the blog’s videos. Media preferences are located at https://[blog_domain].wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-media.php

Enter a comma-separated list of allowed domains into the “Restrict embed playback” text field. You may also optionally choose to disable advertised embeds by default.

Restricted playback only applies to videos with limited embed options. Make sure to uncheck the embed option on new video uploads to limit Flash player behavior.

VideoPress supports inline video playback on Facebook, extending the reach of your content inside the application hundreds of millions of people use to share blog posts and videos every day. Blog posts with a single VideoPress video include special Facebook Share markup to easily expose your video’s thumbnail and Flash player information when a link to your post appears in a status update. The same special markup also improves the visibility of your content in Google search and by Yahoo! Search results.

Links to blog posts with video receive special treatment in the Facebook news feed. A small thumbnail image appears alongside your post’s title and excerpt, encouraging playback. Status updates with video receive special handling by Facebook’s news feed ranking algorithms, increasing the chances your post will be displayed on more news pages.

VideoPress supports direct playback from the Facebook news feed. Any Facebook user can click your video thumbnail to view the full video inside the context of the shared item. A link to your full blog post is also just a click away.

WordPress.com recently added Facebook Publicize the ability to automatically publish new posts from your blog into your Facebook news stream. VideoPress includes special video markup with every new Facebook Publicize post. Your readers will see your video details, thumbnail and full video player directly within their Facebook news feed.