Blogging your Church with WordPress 2:– Adding video to your blog
Many churches now broadcast their services and sermons through the medium of moving pictures, rather than those dull old sermon tapes they have at the back of churches. Here is how it might be done with WordPress.
Once you’ve captured and edited your video (look elsewhere for help on this), you need to get it onto your WordPress-driven church site. You basically have two choices of what to do with your video.
To Host…
If you are hosting WordPress yourself then you could choose to upload the videos to your own hosting account. The main draw back is that video consumes significantly more bandwidth than your ordinary web pages and you need to be prepared to see your bandwidth soar. Playback performance on some hosts can also be a bit erratic.
To host your own video:
- Convert your video to the Flash Video Format using the free Riva Encoder or a free online encoder like Zamzar. (Flash is the best format for online video and the one all the big video sites use).
- Upload the .flv file to a folder on your hosted domain.
- To insert the video into a post, you can use a plugin like the XHTML Video Embed plugin or insert the free FLV Player yourself using their embed code generator wizard.
…or Not to Host
But why go to the trouble of eating up bandwidth and grappling with video encoders, when there are a long list of free video hosting site available? Create an account at YouTube, Vimeo, BlipTV, GoogleVideo or your own personal favourite, and upload your original video. Oh, there is a GodTube as well, but just because they put God’s name on it, doesn’t make it good!
Anyway, these sites will automatically store and convert your video for you. Then you insert the embed code they provide into your post in WordPress.
Some of the plugins below also help with this process.
plugins to try
There are many WordPress plugins available that are supposed to make inserting videos easy. Not all do, but here are a few you may want to try:
- XHTML Video Embed – good for self-hosted and non hosted videos.
- Viper’s Video Quicktags – almost identical to the one above but uses the JW FLV Player
- Embedded Video – integrates into the WYSIWYG editor
- the rest…
More posts in this series:
- Blogging your Church with WordPress 2:– Calendar and Event Plugins
- Blogging your Church with WordPress 2:– Adding video to your blog
[...] And while you’re over at LivingOS looking at themes, be sure to check out a great writeup on Adding Video to your Site [...]
You save a ton on bandwith if you host with the other video share sites. Didn’t realize this until my hosting bill jumped up a couple hundred bucks from a video I hosted and generated a ton of buzz. Lesson learned. If you have the bandwith by all means host it yourself. However if your just starting out, let the bigger guys shoulder some of the load. My thoughts.