flash

VideoPress Now Supports HTML 5 Video Playback

By Jeffro on March 9, 2011

This is the moment every VideoPress user has been waiting for. On March 9th, it was announced on the official VideoPress blog that the service now supports the HTML 5 video format.

VideoPress now supports HTML5 < video > playback in supporting browsers without Flash playback support. Low-power devices such as smartphones can now play MP4 (H.264 video, AAC audio) and Ogg (Theora video, Vorbis audio) content natively in the browser. VideoPress also supports Apple’s AirPlay streaming technology to share video between supporting locally networked devices such as iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Apple TV. Videos with associated transcripts, such as WordPress TV, include WebVTT < track > data for display by supporting browsers.

This is great news for videos uploaded to the service from now on but unfortunately, it doesn’t look like videos uploaded before March 9th will be able to be viewed by an iPhone since those have already been encoded. (I’ve been informed that the HTML 5 changes only apply to WordPress.com hosted videos and not to the VideoPress plugin for self installed WordPress sites. I hope it comes down the pike though.) It would be cool to see an option to re-encode the videos so that HTML 5 support could be added.

VideoPress Undergoes Major Update

By Jeffro on July 1, 2010

VideoPress.com has announced a major update to it’s video player. The player has been completely rewritten using the Open Source Media Framework which is MPL-Licensed by Adobe. VideoPress now offers custom skins and partner integrations including WordPress.com stats, Quantcast, and CDN providers. These partner integrations are made simple through the use of OSMF plugins that will enable advertising and analytics built by each potential partner.

The player itself has a few changes as well such as the embed menu being replaced with a Share menu. The videos shortcode and HTML embed snippet are hidden behind a copy to clipboard button. The direct download links have been exposed for videos so you can download them in MP4 (H.264/AAC) and Ogg (Theora/Vorbis) formats. Last but not least, the new flash player supports different languages and if you’re interested in translating the player into even more languages, you can use the VideoPress translation page.