If you are a website owner and blogger that regularly posts video content to your WordPress page, it’s extremely important that you get access to a reliable video player that you can integrate with your website.
There are a number of excellent WordPress video plug-ins available to bloggers but picking out the right one that you should be using is not always easy. This is why I wrote this article to introduce you the following 10 Best WordPress plugin to quickly and easily embed HTML5 videos and Youtube/Vimeo videos into your posts and pages.
11. MediaElement.js
An HTML5 Video & Audio Player for WordPress websites.
It Provides Flash or Silverlight fallback players for non-HTML5 browsers. Supports iPhone, iPad, and Andriod.
Supports MP4, OGG, WebM, WMV, MP3, WAV, WMA files as well as captions with WebSRT files.
10. Youtube Widget Responsive
Youtube Widget Responsive is a WordPress video plugin that adds Youtube videos to your sidebar widget or regular post.
Features & Options:
- Choosing minutes and seconds of the start and end of the video
- Automatically subtitles
- Auto-hide video progress bar
- Choose theme of controls bar
- Choose color of progress bar
- Show controls bar
- Loop mode
- Enable fullscreen
- Automatically start video
- Mute video On/Off on start
- Hide YouTube logo
- Hide title
- Privacy Mode
- Enable the suggested videos at the end of playback
- Can be set max-width
- Tracking playing for each video on analytics event
- Use the fields to improve the SEO on video
- Write description below video
- YouTube Button subscribe
9. ARVE Advanced Responsive Video Embedder
A responsive, easy-to-use and SEO-friendly WordPress video plugin for handling video (HTML5, Youtube, Vimeo…) embeds on your WordPress site.
Features:
- SEO friendly, lets you specify title, description, upload date to provide search engines with the schema.org data they like to have for better indexing.
- WYSIWYG support. No more messing around with shortcodes and previewing.
- Improved dialog for embedding videos.
- Magically makes those URL embedded videos responsive.
- No ‘lock in’ if do not use shortcodes and use providers WordPress already supports.
- Supports almost every video host that supports iframe embed codes.
- Embeds via pasting the URL in its own line just like WordPress!
- Optionally use very powerful Shortcodes instead.
- Clean shortcode syntax.
- One single button for all providers.
- Responsive embeds with CSS, much better than with JavaScript.
- Tries to be as unobtrusive as possible, sets ‘hide brand’ variables if supported, disables related videos at the end … to help keep people on your site rather then going to YouTube or keep watching videos.
- Autostart (for providers that support it, mobile browsers prevent this)
- Custom URL parameters to use all options providers offer.
- Optional maximal width.
- Video alignment.
- Detailed description of options in-place.
- Automatic detected and custom aspect ratio.
8. Featured Video Plus
This plugin allows you set featured videos for your posts instead of featured images Supports Html5, YouTube, Vimeo and any other video types and services.
Features:
- Automatical replacement or using a shortcode.
- Custom display conditions: only for sticky posts, only on the index page, only when viewing posts and pages, or only inside the main query of each page.
- Auto video resizie for responsive design.
- Left, right and center alignment options.
7. Easy Video Player
This WordPress plugin is designed to be a user-friendly WordPress video plug-in that can showcase self-hosted videos or videos that are linked to Youtube and other hosts. Although this plugin is extremely user-friendly it doesn’t offer the same level of compatibility or customization that are available in some of the other video plugins available for bloggers.
More features:
- Embed MP4 video into your website
- Embed responsive video for a better user experience while viewing from a mobile device
- Embed HTML5 video which are compatible with all major browsers
- Embed video with poster images
- Embed video with autoplay
- Embed video with loop
- Embed video with muted enabled
- Customize the video player using modifier classes
- Embed video using three different skins
- Embed video using MediaElement player or default WordPress video player
6. Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator
A responsive video embed plugin which makes it easier to play user uploaded videos in a responsive, auto-resizing, cross-browser HTML5 video player with thumbnail support.
5. FV Flowplayer Video Player
FV player is compatible with 98% of browsers available currently. The best part about using this is it can work as a host for HTML links, pre-roll ads, YouTube, Vimeo and more.
It comes with lightbox features and its overall completely compatible with a series of other video platforms. With searchable transcripts and a series of fantastic features, this truly is the future of WordPress plug-ins that you should be using for video.
4. Video Gallery and Youtube Gallery
A video gallery plugin which displays Youtube/Vimeo/HTML5 videos in a fully responsive gallery lightbox.
Features:
- Supports unlimited videos.
- 8 Advanced views.
- Supports playlist.
- Titles & Descriptions.
- Load More and Pagination.
3. WP Video Lightbox
A mobile-friendly lightbox plugin which allows you to embed and display Youtube/Vimeo/HTML5 videos in a responsive modal popup with autoplay, deeplinking and navigation support.
The author of this plugin also provided a video to explain how the plugin works:
More features:
- Automatically retrieve the thumbnail for your video and embed in lightbox.
- Load YouTube video over https. This is great if you have SSL installed on your site.
- Disable suggested videos at the end of a YouTube video.
- Flexibility of using both shortcode/HTML code to pop up media in lightbox.
- Show description of a popup in overlay.
2. Video Thumbnails
The Video Thumbnails plugin automatically retrieves video thumbnails from your videos and display the thumbnails in your posts or pages.
Supported video sites:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Vine
- Twitch
- Dailymotion
- Metacafe
- TED
- VK
- Blip
- Google Drive
- Funny or Die
- CollegeHumor
- MPORA
- Livestream
- Yahoo Screen
- Wistia
- Youku
- Tudou
- SAPO
- Rutube
1. YouTube Embed Plus
Not only Youtube videos, the Youtube plugin also allows you to easily embed Youtube playlists, channels, galleries and even live streams into your WordPress posts and pages.
Features:
- YouTube gallery capability (channel and playlist) – The ability to make playlist and channel embeds have a gallery layout. By default, the plugin can generate a grid-based responsive playlist or channel gallery >>. Your visitors can browse through pages of video thumbnails and choose from videos that are pulled from an entire YouTube channel or playlist.
- YouTube gallery auto continuous play – embed a playlist or channel gallery and allow it to play one video after the next without requiring viewers to click a thumbnail
- YouTube Live Stream – Given a link to a YouTube channel, the plugin wizard automatically finds a live stream if one is active in that channel and generates the embed code for you. On the settings page, you can also set defaults of what to automatically display if a live stream is not active at a given moment. For example, you can have your site display a gallery of a channel’s entire video library so that users can have something to watch in the meantime. We hope it’s a time saver.
- Improved accessibility by using title attributes for screen reader support. It should help your site pass functional accessibility evaluations (FAE).
- Improved ajax theme support
- Site origin information with each embed code as an extra security measure. In YouTube’s/Google’s own words, checking this option “protects against malicious third-party JavaScript being injected into your page and hijacking control of your YouTube player.” We especially recommend checking it as it adds higher security than the built-in YouTube embedding method that comes with the current version of WordPress (i.e. oembed).
- Easy “Insert” button for both the Visual and Text mode of the editor (for YouTube gallery and live stream embedding as well)
- Embed an entire YouTube channel as a (non-gallery, single embedded player) playlist
- Start video settings for playlist embeds. You can now choose to start a playlist with a specific video or have the plugin automatically start with the most recently added video.
- Volume level initialization – helpful when autoplay is checked
- iOS playback preferences
- Automatic localization/internationalization so you can set the player’s interface language from English to another
- Instant HTTPS support. It can even convert past non-HTTPS videos to HTTPS. Did you know that Google uses HTTPS/SSL support as a ranking signal for SERP?
- “At a Glance” direct access to your YouTube posts/pages
- Shortcode support for embedding multiple videos on one line
- General playlist embedding support
- YouTube plugin migration support
If you have suggestions or more plugin recommendation, please let me know.
