Many bloggers find it helpful to embed personal video and other media in blog posts.  It can be challenging to find an easy way to add multimedia to a blog post.  I will walk you through one process of making it possible to do so.

WordPress is somewhat limited in the media file types that it handles by default. To see if your favorite type is handled, check here. If it’s not, you may want to…

Expand your MIME types

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension. It’s a communications protocol that allows for transmission of different forms of data such as audio, binary and video—it no longer refers strictly to email data transfer.

To expand the types of video (or other media) you can upload and stream, first install the PJW Mime Config plugin.  Once the MIME plugin is installed, you can add any of the file extensions that  you would like to upload to your WordPress blog.  The first one I added was .3gp, the type of video used by many mobile devices today.  In the plugin, I added .3gp as the file extension and video/3gpp as the associated MIME type.  Now WordPress will happily accept my .3gp video uploads.

Here is an extensive list of Mime types you may like to add http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mime-types.shtml

Upload and play your video: All-in-One Video Pack

Once you’ve made sure that your media file type will work in WordPress, you’ll need a player to play the video within the posts.  The player plugin I chose is the All-in-One Video Pack by Kaltura.  Once installed and activated, the plugin is ready to go, no additional configuration needed.  You will need to sign up for an account with Kaltura and this will be handled directly in your WP control panel. This plugin also comes with a sidebar widget that will show your latest videos if you would like to do so.

I chose All-In-One Video Pack for videos, but it will handle many other types of media as well. For instance, you can film directly from your webcam or insert photos or audio from your computer.  It also will pull photos from Flikr or NYPL; for audio, you can pull from Jamendo, CCMixter or your own collection.  For video you have the choices or Metacafe or PhotoBucket, along with your home collection.

The one down side I had with All-in-One Video Pack was browser crashes.  The upload process would sometimes stall and the browser would crash.  This only happened to me in Chrome and has not happened in a while.  Still, if using this plugin, I would save any text as draft before adding media to it… just in case.  All in all, All-in-One seems to be a decent solution to streaming video.

Once you’ve installed All-in-One, you will have a new option under Upload/Insert when you are editing your post.  You will see a red button called Add interactive video.  To add a video, simply click the button, choose upload, browse for the folder you would like to add in your post, and click upload.  That’s it—you now have your video playing in your blog post.