SWFPut – SWFlash Put

SWFPut provides ‘responsive’ video for posts and pages.
SWFPut makes the presentation of video reliable for your
visitors: several conditions are handled well, such as
the uneven support for HTML5 video formats in the major
browsers, the possible lack of support for either HTML5
video or flash video in the visitor’s browser, and even
the possiblilty that JavaScript might be disabled in your
visitor’s browser.

In addition to video for posts and pages, SWFPut provides
a video widget for use in widget areas, such as a sidebar.

SWFPut video is ‘responsive’: it should display at a
suitable size on your visitor’s device, whether large
or small (a responsive WordPress theme is necessary).

SWFPut makes video setup easy and flexible by providing
an easy dialog based setup similar to (and based on)
that used by WordPress core media, and also an
advanced form with additional settings, which
appears in a new “metabox”
on the editor page. For widgets, the form appears with
the usual drag and drop widget interface. After adding
video objects, the form will continue to be useful for
making changes (or, if you wish, to delete the video).

In WordPress versions 3.3 and greater, video added by
SWFPut will be visible in the post/page visual editor.

As many video objects as you wish can be placed in posts
pages, and of course the widget supports as many instances
as you wish.
You may specify HTML5 or flash video, or both with one
being primary content and the other as fallback.

Here are some features of SWFPut to consider:

• SWFPut works directly with media file
  URL’s; that is, SWFPut does not embed
  the video players of providers such as YouTube or Vimeo.
  SWFPut is for video files which are accessible by URL,
  whether hosted at your site or off-site.
  The setup form provides two media selection lists.
  The first is a selection of files found (recursively)
  under your wp-content/uploads directory. This list
  has the advantage that it does not use the
  WordPress media library — it will find files that
  you upload ‘by hand’ (with ftp, ssh, etc.). This feature
  will work around upload size limits that might prevent
  you from uploading large video files to the media library.
  The second is a selection of files found in the
  WordPress media library and is presented with the
  file name and the ‘attachment id’. This refers to files
  by ID, so it might be helpful if you manipulate media
  and expect ID associations to be valid. Files selections
  are filtered by name extension: FLV and MP4 for flash,
  and MP4, OGG and OGV, and WEBM for HTML5 video.

• Video resources do not need to be on your site:
  any URL can be specified, so you may present players
  for off-site of 3rd party resources.

• SWFPut does not interfere with the appearance of
  a site: a video is presented jsut as an image
  (such as .png or .jpg) is, with the same sort of
  style, and optional caption. The appearance of the
  video control interface, or control bar, is simple
  and quiet so it should not clash with site design.

• SWFPut allows you to set the display aspect ratio
  for the video. Some video is ‘anamorphic’ in that
  the pixel width and height do not match the intended
  proportion of display width and height. You might
  film your child’s school play as 16:9 ‘widescreen’
  but use a space saving feature of your recorder that
  saves the video at 480×360 (which is not 16:9). You can
  set SWFPut to display the video at the intended 16:9
  aspect ratio. You may set any aspect ratio (make it
  distorted if you wish).

• The core features of the flash video player program
  included with SWFPut have been verified to work with
  the Gnash free-software browser plugin, which is good
  if you care about free/libre software users. (At the
  time of this writing, Gnash does not handle the MP4
  video container format, so it is preferable that you
  prepare flash video in the FLV container, even using the
  h.264 and AAC codecs. Of course, you may use MP4 if
  you must.)

• The flash video player program included with SWFPut
  is written and compiled with the Ming PHP extension,
  and the code is included, so you may modify the player.
  The HTML5 player is written JavaScript, and the original,
  un-minified version is included, so you may modify it.
  In fact, the zip archive available at the WordPress
  repository includes all sources, although a POSIX/Unix
  environment with certain tools is required to build.

• Localization sources are included; hopefully, polyglot
  users will help with translations.