How to Include an FLV Video in WordPress Blog

Example “Embedded” FLV:

I recently was asked to help with adding embedded flash video to a WordPress blog. There are a few different WordPress plugins available for this purpose but the first one I looked at(per the client’s request) was out of date and buggy even when it did work. Note that all of these plugins use the Flash Video Player as the basis for the actual playing of the flv video format, however the Flash Video Player does not directly integrate with WordPress. That’s where the plugin is needed. The best one out there right now is this one. The install is fairly straight-forward on the server. Then once that’s done it couldn’t be easier to insert an flv into your blog entries.

Once the server-side stuff is installed (which I did for the client), I also created a new directory for them named ‘flv’. In it is where all flv files should be uploaded to. Then, in the blog entry, simply type the following code:

“["flv:http://elearninglive.com/flv/video.flv 480 320"]“

Note: take out the quotation marks in your code!

Of course I substituted my client’s URL for my own to protect their identity for this post. But you get the idea. So the paramaters are: URL (you can use a relative or absolute path too) to the flv, followed by a space, then the width of the movie, space, then height. Note that the coolest feature about this plugin is that you can fullscreen the video. So keep in mind the initial size is set by the blogger but the user can fullscreen it too (so long as they have Flash Player 9 installed – that is the first version that offered true fullscreen capability).

There are many options available with this plugin that are discussed on the plugin author’s page. For example, if you don’t want the user to be able to fullscreen a movie you can do that.

One last note: in case it isn’t clear – the flv is not actually “embedded” – it is streamed and can be stored and streamed from anywhere (meaning any server in the world), not just the same server that the blog is hosted on like this example. Truly “embedding” flash video is, 99.9% of the time, a dumb way to go. Streaming/progressive download is the ticket.

Hope this helps!