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.