Add YouTube To WordPress With Viper Plug-In

Embedded Video Made Easy

Last month I covered some quick-n-dirty ways to display YouTube video in a WordPress blog site (Publish YouTube Video on Your Blog), but didn’t have time to review a plug-in I noticed at the last moment: Viper Video Quicktags.

This nifty plug-in promises to greatly simplify video integration. It supports BBCode tags and (in the 3.1.0 beta) provides the ability to launch external video players from a link.

Once configured, Viper provides several buttons in the WordPress administration screen when writing a new post that allow bloggers to instantly place video blocks from YouTube, Google Video and IFILM.

Using the Plug-In

You can use the plug-in with or without the WYSIWYG (rich text) editor option, but you may want to enable it if you’re having trouble (the beta worked ok for me). With the Viper enabled, new editor buttons allow you to past videos using the clip ID or file URL.

(screenshot: Viper Video Quicktags Interface)

Embedding a Hosted Video

To add a video link from one of the three supported services, add the ID using the appropriate button. The resulting code in your post will look something like this:

  [youtube]Pfq8ODg_ZVA[/youtube]

You can change the video size by adding “width” and “height” parameters:

  Pfq8ODg_ZVA[/youtube]

The result will look like this:

I have to admit that at this point I began to wonder why I need this plug-in: I had to go to YouTube to get the video ID and could just as easily have copied the “embed” code from there.

Hmmm. Let’s try the QuickTime option…

Embedding a QuickTime Video from File

Viper allows bloggers to embed Apple QuickTime MOV files. Simply click the appropriate icon, specify the file URL, display width and height parameters, and viola! Embedded video.

The code looks like this:

[quicktime width="320" height="240"]http://www.vibetechnology.com/pub/video/clips/verizon-ferret.mov[/quicktime]

I have one problem with the way the plug-in behaves here – there is no title screen to make users aware of the video before actually playing it. Default QuickTime plug-in settings will go straight to loading then playing the file, which makes the page into which a MOV file is embedded larger than it needs to be at first.

One nice touch is that if users don’t have QuickTime installed, the MOV is embedded in a way that creates a “Install QuickTime” link.

Launch External Video Players

You can also add links that will invoke an external player by clicking the Windows Media Player icon. While this appears to be meant for .WMV files, this can also be used for AVI, FLV and MOV files. I’m not sure what the savings is here – you get the same behavior by adding a link to a file.

The code:

  [video width="320" height="320"]http://www.vibetechnology.com/pub/video/clips/verizon-ferret.mov[/video]

Summary

VibeTalk Rating: [rate 2]

Overall, I wasn’t too impressed with this plug-in.

While it reduces the amount you need to type, it doesn’t necessarily save you any time because you’ll still need to visit YouTube, Google or IFILM sites to locate the cryptic video ID. The shortcut to embed QuickTime videos is nice, but you end up configuring the QT plug-in externally anyway. I give this plug-in 2 stars.

Maybe I should go back and get Video Blogger to work, but I’ll probably stick to the Anarchy Media Player, which is open source and plays music files too.

Viper Video Quicktags by Viper007Bond
Version 3.0.0 [download]
Version 3.1.0 Beta 1 [download]
More information…