The folks at Automattic rolled out an upgrade this week to the video quality of videos hosted on WordPress.com blogs using their VideoPress service.
The upgrade adds support for HD as well as other formats, using automated transcoding (see the announcement for more info):
With the video upgrade (available on your upgrades page, bottom left of dashboard navigation) when you upload a video of almost any format we’ll crunch it into several different formats just right for streaming on the web, DVD quality, HD quality, and even optimized for iTunes and Miro.
Videos can be streamed and embedded . . . on WordPress.com or on any site around the world, even in full HD.
I’m very happy – as all content creators and consumers should be – to see support for Miro as well as iTunes, along with the classic ease-of-use you’d expect from the hosted services at WordPress.com.
Taking it one step further, though, Automattic has released as open source the entire framework they’re using to manage uploaded videos, transcode them to additional formats, and serve them to consuming sites. This isn’t your average consumer-grade WordPress plugin, though, as they warn in the description:
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