You have the ability to upload videos to your WordPress website, but you should really consider what this means for your site. Hosting your own videos leads to slow load times and not properly functioning. Instead, you can choose to embed them. Embedding a video requires you to upload the file to a 3rd party video-hosting service, such as YouTube, Wistia or Vimeo, and then copy a small, furnished code and paste it on a page or post on your WordPress site.
Your video will then appear on your site, specifically in the location where the embedded code is pasted, while it’s also available for streaming on the video host’s server, as opposed to hosting your video on your own web server. As for selfhosting, it would mean that you are uploading video files to your site, using WordPress’ builtin file uploader, in the same manner you would upload an image or photo to your site. Now, what is wrong with uploading video files to your own web server, especially if it is shared?
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Limited File Size and Storage Space
Most providers of web hosting services would limit the maximum size of files to be uploaded at about 50 MB, restricting you to upload videos with a few minutes in duration. Also, uploading large media files might violate the Acceptable Use Policy terms with the host provider, which can result in your account being shut down. If you are able to upload large video files to your server frequently, you could eventually exceed the storage space limit that the provider has imposed on your account, especially when you back up your site on a regular basis. In addition to the amount of disk space occupied by your video files, it will start taking longer for your backups to execute, as more data would require more disk space.
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Shared Server Bandwidth
Unlike images, which are just measured in kilobytes, video files can be quite large in size, with a typical HD video easily weighing in at more than a hundred MB. Now, what do you think would happen to your shared hosting server when a large number of people are attempting to watch the same video simultaneously? This is why web hosting providers usually allocate a certain amount of bandwidth and other resources for every server on their network, based upon the average traffic rates that do not include serving large media files to hundreds or more individuals at the same time. As you can see, too many requests for the same large file can quickly exceed web server limits, bringing your site and others that are hosted on the same server to their knees.
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Lack of a Single File Format Standard for Web Videos
The current draft specification of HTML5 does not specify which video formats specific browsers should support, resulting in major web browsers diverging and each supporting a different format. For example, Safari and Internet Explorer will play H.264 (MP4) videos, but not Ogg and WebM, while FireFox will play WebM and Ogg videos, but not H.264. Withal, Google Chrome is able to play all the major video formats. However, if you want to ensure your videos will play back on any of these browsers, you might have to do some conversion of your videos into multiple formats, which adds to the burden of having to upload different video files, with each one having potentially hundreds of MB size. This also means you have to think about how much bandwidth your internet provider is allowing you to use before they impose bandwidth caps.
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SlowLoading Videos and Unexpected Pauses During Playback
If your video files live on a single server with limited bandwidth, people who want to watch them might experience unexpected pauses during playback, while their computers wait for the file to stream or download to their devices. This problem is contributed by slow internet connection, where users are still complaining about slowloading videos.
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Tricky Video Players
A small piece of web software, a video player is installed on your site to automatically detect what type of device is requesting your videos, along with how fast the connection speed is, and then deliver the right video versions to the viewers. You can find a wide variety of these players that can handle these tasks, but take note that WordPress 3.6 actually includes a builtin video player that will do away with the need for a 3rdparty video plugin. Though this is good news, it can get a bit tricky.
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Loss of Traffic and Visibility
When you host your videos on 3rd-party sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, where most people turn to when they are searching for certain topics, you will get the benefit from their popularity, which means that users would easily find your videos and eventually your site, which is great for getting more web traffic. Also, the social sharing features on these 3rd-party sites would influence other people to share your videos with their families and friends, expanding your reach.
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A Lot of Video Conversions
Most of your target audience will tend to watch your videos from their desktops or laptops with the benefit of a highspeed internet connection. For this group of individuals, you will want to deliver an HD-quality and large video file, so they can watch it in full screen if they want. This would generally mean a 720p or 1080p file at a high streaming bitrate of about 5,000 to 8,000 kbps. However, you also want to encode a lower-resolution and smaller version that you can deliver to mobile devices, such as tablets and phones, not to mention those viewers with slower internet connections. As you would have a dozen or more individual video files for playback on all devices and major web browsers, it would be difficult for your site to know which of those video files are appropriate to serve to a certain viewer.
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Varying Quality Across Browsers
As previously mentioned, you will need to convert your videos into multiple formats and sizes, which means that you will also need a software application to handle the task for you. With the plethora of such apps out there, you will find yourself needing more than one to handle conversions for different formats, as most of these apps can handle individual conversion processes and produce varying quality of the videos.
Your clips might look great as MP4, but its quality would vary when it’s viewed as another format on a different browser. Moreover, remember that each web browser handles playback in different ways, which furthers the possibility that your videos would play differently for every viewer. -
Difficult Codes or Shortcodes
3rd-party plugins would require you to perform a bit of coding to tell the video players which format you have created and where it is located on the server. Even if you have a builtin support for videos on WordPress, you will still need to construct a short-code. This would involve getting all your video files uploaded to your server and installing a video player that can handle all the detection and such.
Embedding Videos
Now that you know which is the best solution for adding videos to your own website, which is embedding, it is time to learn how to do it. First, upload your video to one of the well-established and popular video hosting services, such as YouTube and Vimeo PRO. Once you have finished uploading, where it will be ready for viewing, copy the video URL and paste it on the page or post it into your WordPress site where you want it to appear. When people view your page, the video will be shown in the location where the URL is pasted, but the file itself will be available for streaming on its host’s servers. The embedded video player will then automatically detect the device used by viewers, the internet connection speed and the browser, and then serve the right versions of your video to them. By doing so, you will not experience any installation, need for plugins to keep it up to date or deal with any tricky codes.
The host would employ a massive network of redundant web servers across the globe, so when you upload a video file, it will be automatically replicated on the content delivery network (CDN) of every server, which means that your site’s visitors requesting the video will be served from the node that is closest to them, ensuring smooth playback and great viewing experience!
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