A number of people have asked me: why do you still have Flash based videos on your blog?
The answer: my blog is hosted on wordpress.com, which strips out the video tag and also does not (yet) have it’s HTML5 video player. There is a trick to get around the video tag being stripped for self hosted WordPress, but not for wordpress.com.
The good news is that WordPress is working on their own HTML5 video player. Also, there is a bug filed to fix the issue of stripping out the video tag. Also good: wordpress.com automatically encodes everything you upload to Videopress into Ogg Theora. So, when HTML5 video does arrive, it will be Ogg ready.
As a happy wordpress.com customer (love the service) with a fair bit of traffic at marksurman.commons.ca it’s worth it to me to wait around until the HTML5 video issue is fixed. In the meantime, I am posting all of my videos directly to wordpress.com using Videopress (and their Flash player) and also providing a link to the Ogg Theora version for people who would rather watch my videos natively in the browser.
PS. If anyone has a workaround that doesn’t involve leaving wordpress.com, would love to hear about it.
If you are able to edit the theme files you could use the code we develop for Mozilla Hispano:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=es&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nukeador.com%2F06%2F12%2F2009%2Fvideo-ogv-con-html5-en-wordpress%2F&sl=es&tl=en
(Sorry, it’s in Spanish but you could see the original to get the correct code)
Regards.
Nukeador: thanks for this. Super helpful, and may be good to post this in response to the open bug on wordpress. Maybe they can integrate this shortcode for everyone?
For people like me using the hosted version on wordpress.com, I’m not sure if we can directly modify functions.php? My guess is ‘no’. Do you know?
Hi, Mark and Nukeador. You can’t modify functions.php in wordpress.com blogs, yet. Like you said, you will have to wait till wordpress.com fix the bug.
Uhm, maybe you could install a wordpress plugin to handle video tag, like this one:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/degradable-html5-audio-and-video/
Also, wordpress.com doesn’t allow plugins: http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/
D’oh! I had no idea, then you will have to wait for them or use your own hosting :S
Do they let you use either the object or iframe tags? Link the video file directly.
Firefox 3.6’s video playback is better than 3.5’s, but it is still not up to par with the experience that Flash provides. On slower machines the audio gets glitchy just from hovering over controls, and fullscreen playback is completely unusable (because of very bad performance). (Even though Flash can play back 720px HD videos just fine!)
Hi Mark,
I am a consultant working on VideoPress for WordPress.com. HTML5 video playback based on canPlayType browser capability testing is something WordPress.com plans to introduce in the future. Flash will remain as a fallback for browsers incapable of HTML5 video or incompatible with available codecs, profiles, and levels.
Niall: that is amazing news. Happy to hear it. Is there a timeline for deployment? Need users to test? Happy to do so.
WordPress.com does not like pre-announcing product timelines.
VideoPress now supports limiting included videos to only free software formats. Could you please give the new feature a try and share your thoughts?
http://videopress.com/2010/06/04/freedom-embed/
-Niall Kennedy
Product Lead
VideoPress
Niall: just tried it. Works GREAT! Many thanks for this. Also sent out a positive tweet about it last night. Really impressed by WordPress, as always.
Impressive text. Ready to read more.
Kate Simpson
accompagnatrici escorts a roma