WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 16. Adding Video and Audio

The popularity of video on the Internet has exploded over the past few years as technical barriers to displaying video have fallen one by one. WordPress offers a number of built-in options for putting video on your website, and in this lesson I help you sort through them, as well as the options for audo files.

For the greatest flexibility and ease of handling video files, particularly if you're going to have a lot of video on your site, I would recommend using one of the many WordPress plugins for video, and you can read about those in Lesson 37. If you're just going to have the occasional video, the choices offered in this lesson should be adequate.

The first decision you'll need to make when putting video on your site is whether to have a simple link or to actually have the video playing within your web page. In the course of showing you how each is done, I'll cover the second decision, which is whether to store your own video files on your server or on a video-sharing site like YouTube.

Uploading/Inserting Video

If you just need a link to a video, you would use the second icon from the left on the Upload/Insert menu. Clicking it brings up a window that looks exactly like the one for images. The From Computer tab is always the default so we'll begin with that.

Click the Select Files button and in the popup window locate your video file on your computer. When you're done, click Select and the file begins to upload, with the regular progress bar. Video ...