Want to show off?  Do you want to embed video or run a PodCast from your WordPress site?  Just to show you how easy it is to enhance your WordPress site with either video or audio, I’ve installed a WordPress video plugin.  I am touting both a plugin and a media experience itself.

First you’ll need a plugin to be able to show your handiwork, then you’ll need the video file component downloaded to your WordPress site (you can use the Media menu item) for the plugin to display.  I’m using Noor’s ‘Easy WordPress Video Plugin‘ that you can find on the WordPress.org site (click the link) with some pretty decent documentation from Noor’s plugin pages. Although there are a number of plugins that play audio and video, this one is as the name implies ‘Easy’.

To install it, the quickest method is to go to your plugin menu, click the Add New button and search for Easy Video Plugin.  It will appear at the top; click the Install Now button on the plugin description, then click the Activate link and presto, you’re in business.

Once you have the plugin installed and activated just take your MP4 video and put it in your site and insert a short code on the page or post you want.  Go to the Media menu, click Add New, click Select Files, browse to the location of your video (my MP4 file in this case) and click Open.  The video will then be uploaded, as long as it’s smaller than the ‘maximum size’ allowed by your WordPress.  If you can’t use the Media loader because of a size restriction, you’ll have to use FTP to get the video file on your site.  I’m not going to get into FTP, if you need it you’ll have to talk to your hosting company about FTP access to your site, but even using FTP allows you to drag and drop (usually) your file to a folder that exists or you create.

Now that you’ve got your video downloaded, you need to know exactly where it is and what it’s name is because you’ll use that path to tell the shortcode, that makes this whole thing work, where to find the video on the site.  If you use the Media functions, you can edit the download and get the path.  All you’ll need is the following shortcode to embed and activate the video in your post or page (the path is a ‘sample’ that you’ll see is close to what you’ll get from a WordPress media upload):

evp_embed_video url=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/videos/vid1.mp4″

You may want to put the shortcode in through the text editing tab of your post or page, though with Noor’s plugin it’s not necessary, and it’s always wrapped in square brackets [ ] to make it actually function.  I didn’t put the brackets in my example, or it would have embedded the video:

You can, though I don’t recommend it, have the video play automatically with the ‘autoplay’ attribute:

evp_embed_video url=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/videos/vid1.mp4″ autoplay=”true”

Or you can set the width (well and the height too, though the default aspect ratio is “0.417”) with the width attribute (my width is set to 500):

evp_embed_video url=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/videos/vid1.mp4″ width=”500″

The documentation covers all of this and a lot more, so just install and go!