{"id":356370,"date":"2021-11-09T14:53:18","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T22:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/?p=356370"},"modified":"2021-11-09T14:54:43","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T22:54:43","slug":"videopress-for-wordpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/videopress-for-wordpress\/","title":{"rendered":"VideoPress for WordPress"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The leade here is that VideoPress makes video on WordPress way better. VideoPress is a part of Jetpack.<\/a> And now, if VideoPress is the only thing you care about from the Jetpack world, you can pay for it \u00e0 la carte as low as $4.77\/month. Or, get it included in the Jetpack Complete plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lemme get into it, so you can see all of what VideoPress does for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Optimized, CDN-Hosted Video<\/h3>\n\n\n

When you drag-and-drop a video file onto the WordPress editor (even without VideoPress), it will upload and display just like an image will. Video files are generally much larger files than images, so right off the bat, you might run into file size limits. Your WordPress host likely limits upload size between 4-128 MB. Video can easily be bigger than that. With VideoPress you’ve got up to 5 GB per file to work with (although they recommend 1 GB or lower for the best uploading success). You get 1 TB of total storage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if you manage to host hundreds-of-megabyte video files yourself, that’s a heck of a lot of bandwidth for your own servers to be serving. Video is really meant to be served from servers tuned for video distribution, which is exactly what you get on VideoPress. It’s kind of like having your own personal YouTube or Vimeo, where the videos become embeds that come from a host service rather than hosted yourself, which is particularly ideal for video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For performance reasons alone, VideoPress is worth it. You likely know that images are hard<\/a>. Between WordPress and Jetpack, image handling on your website is extremely good (images are optimized, CDN-hosted, served with srcset<\/code>\/sizes<\/code>, lazy-loaded, etc.). VideoPress makes video handling extremely good with the same features as well as some features really unique to video, like streaming video with adaptive bitrate streaming optimized for mobile.<\/p>\n\n\n

Feature-Rich, Add-Free, Customizeable Player<\/h3>\n\n\n

So in a way, yes, you get a video player that is like what you’d get with YouTube. You get additional features like playback speed control, picture-in-picture, full-screen, volume control, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

That’s a lot better than a native <video><\/code> element that you get by default. But unlike<\/em> a YouTube player, there is no ads, potentially showing things you don’t want your visitors seeing on your site.<\/p>\n\n\n

Here’s an example<\/h3>\n\n\n

In an extremely meta move, here’s an embedded VideoPress video of Dave and I talking… about VideoPress:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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