Optaros Labs

WordPress Video Framework released

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:

This plugin is different from other plugins because it can not be used “out-of-the-box”. It is intended for self-hosted large scale WordPress MU sites that want to develop their own customized video solutions. In addition to Web servers for WordPress MU , it requires at least one file server and one dedicated video transcoder. Considerable amount of PHP coding and system administration skills are required to install, customize and deploy this plugin.

As more and more significant, large-scale enterprise customers discover the flexibility, power, and ease of use WordPress offers, this style of plugin shows great promise – we look forward to helping some Optaros clients use this to add video to WordPress based platforms.

Here’s a quick high level diagram of how the framework works, from the plugin page on wordpress.org:

WordPress Video Solution Framework

My favorite part may be step 1 of the install instructions. After a bunch of file copying the directions say:

Carefully study the source code, understand your system environment, and modify places marked “CUSTOMIZE”.

Adding this video platform to the P2 microblogging theme and Buddy Press, which also recently went 1.0 and is intended for building social networks on a WordPressMU code base, WordPress is making substantial progress toward being more than just a blogging application- it’s becoming a full-blown media and community platform.

Tags: Enterprise, Media, MySQL, open source, PHP, Platform, Scale, Transcoding, video, wordpress, WordPressMU, WP, WPMU

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 4:53 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.