The Extreme Video Plugin for Wordpress, written by Ross Gerbasi, lets you easily embed Google videos in your Wordpress blog. But judging from the comments on the plugin page, a lot of people have trouble getting it up and running; it seems like just downloading the plugin’s files is a daunting task for some.

I kept notes as I worked through the installation process, and turned them into this tutorial. Even if you are fairly new to Wordpress, these instructions should help you get the Extreme Video plugin installed and configured. Take your time, read slowly, and you should be OK. If you like, you can print the instructions with images or without to refer to as you work.

Note: I am using the latest stable release of Wordpress, and my current theme is a variation of Reef Sandals’s Misty Look. If you are using other versions of Wordpress or other themes, your results may vary.

Download the files

Before you begin, download the plugin files. You can either get them from the author’s site, or download everything in a .zip file from me.

The contents of the zip hosted here are:

wp-ExtremeVideo.php [the plugin file, version 2.3 BETA]
flvPlayer.swf [the Flash video player]
gv.swf [the Google Video player — renamed to fit the plugin's defaults]

The files were downloaded from the author’s site on September 23, 2006, virus checked, and zipped.

 

Install and configure the Extreme Video plugin for Wordpress

1. I advise putting the .swf files in their own directory on your site. Use an existing directory, or create a new one one. On my site I created one called swf, and I’ll refer to this swf directory throughout in the instructions below.

I’m also assuming that you are using the files in my .zip file. If you are using the files downloaded from the plugin author’s site, you’ll need to rename googleplayer.swf to gv.swf. Once you’ve done that, the instructions below will make sense if you start with step 3.

2. Unzip extreme_video_2.3.zip

3. Upload gv.swf and flvPlayer.swf to the swf directory on your Wordpress blog’s website.

4. Open wp-ExtremeVideo.php in your favorite text editor.

5. Scroll down to line 77 or so, until you find this bit of code:

//* defaults to home url/gv.swf
DEFINE('GV_MYGVURL',get_settings('home').'/gv.swf');

Change the red part above to reflect the real path to gv.swf on your blog’s website. For our example, it might look like this if your domain is www.mysite.com, and your Wordpress install is in the root:

//* defaults to home url/gv.swf
DEFINE('GV_MYGVURL',get_settings('home').'http://www.mysite.com/swf/gv.swf');

6. Scroll to line 108 or so until you find this bit of code:

//Path to Flash FLV PLayer SWF< br />
DEFINE('PP_PLAYERPATH', "http://www.yourpath.com/flvPlayer.swf");

This tells the script where to find the video player on your site. For our example, change the red part to this:

//Path to Flash FLV PLayer SWF
DEFINE('PP_PLAYERPATH', "http://www.mysite.com/swf/flvPlayer.swf");


7. You are done editing! Save the wp-ExtremeVideo.php file and upload it to your Wordpress plugins directory.

By now you should have uploaded gv.swf and flvPlayer.swf to your swf directory, and wp-ExtremeVideo.php to your plugins directory. Here is what the directory structure should look like:

If this much has been challenging for you, take a break and pat yourself on the back. Have a nice cup of tea or coffee. When you’re feeling refreshed and strong again, continue to the next step: ACTIVATION, baby!

 

Activate the Extreme Video plugin in Wordpress

Log in to your Wordpress dashboard, and click the Plugins tab. You should see the WP-Extreme Video plugin listed. Click Activate to (duh!) activate the plugin.

That’s all you need to do to configure and install the plugin for basic use. Now we’ll look at how to embed a video in a post. I will cover Google Video in this tutorial. For the YouTube instructions, see my tutorial here .

Embedding a Google Video in your Wordpress Blog with the Extreme Video plugin

1. Go to Google video and find a video you want to embed. For our example, I will be a cheeky tart and use one of my own videos. This is its URL, the address where it lives on Google. The part in red below tells Google which particular video you want to play; it’s the unique identifier for your particular video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1528165567147684910


Once you are on the page of the Google video you want to embed, click the blue button in the right-hand sidebar that says Email - Blog - Post to MySpace. It’s circled in pink in the picture below.

2. Click the link to “Embed HTML” (see below)

3. A window with some code will appear (see below).

This code contains all the information you need to embed the video in your Wordpress blog. Copy the code and paste it into a text document so that you have it to refer to. My code for this particular video looks like this (important parts in red):

<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-1528165567147684910&hl=en"> </embed>


(The &hl=en part just tells the Google player to use English — if you are using Google in another language, your code may look a bit different. You can leave that part of the code out, and Google will just use the default language.)

4. Now go to your Wordpress Dashboard and click the Write tab to open the Write Post window.

5. The basic format for embedding videos in your posts looks like this:

[gv data="data string"
width="width in pixels" height="height in pixels"][/gv]


Below you’ll see the code you need to embed a Google video (I have inserted line breaks so it will fit on the page. The data tag should be all one line in your actual post). Note that I’ve inserted the important red parts from the Google code we just looked at above:

[gv data="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-1528165567147684910&hl=en"
width="400" height="326"][/gv]


If you have correctly installed and configured the plugin and uploaded the .swf files to the right directory (as explained above), you should see the video when you publish and view the post. In your own case, the code will be different to mine — it will reflect the address of your particular Google video.

If you don’t see the video when you publish your post, then something is whacky and beyond my skill to heal, or you’ve got a typo somewhere. Carefully check your code and make sure you don’t have any missed quotation marks or other little mistakes.

6. Unfortunately, there is a problem with this plugin that breaks the “View this video on Google” link. If you want to fix this, you have to go back and edit your post. I’m taking you through this step by step just so you can understand the process involved — once you know what to do you can of course fix the broken link when you first embed the video.

To fix the broken link, you need to add the &playerId= code to your “data” string. After the &playerId= you put the same address number that you have in the docId. So for my particular video I need to add this:

&playerId=-1528165567147684910


The full string now looks like this (again, I have inserted line breaks so it will fit on the page – the “data” string should be all one unbroken line with no spaces in it):

[gv data="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-1528165567147684910
&hl=en&playerId=-1528165567147684910"
width="400" height="326"][/gv]


When you republish the post, the link to “view this video on Google” should now work.

Changing the size of the embedded video.

You can change the size of the player on your site. Just replace the values inside the width=”400″ and height=”326″ tags with whatever you want. I usually multiply each value by a decimal to keep the aspect ratio correct. A nice size for my example video is 80% of the original size. For example

400 * 0.8 = 320
326 * 0.8 = 261.

So the new code looks like this (again, I’ve added line breaks here):

[gv data="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-1528165567147684910
&hl=en&playerId=-1528165567147684910" width="320" height="261"][/gv]


Trying to make the Google player smaller than about 280 x 228 pixels is not a good idea, because the playback controls get squashed and ugly.

That’s all there is to it! You should now be up an running, able to use the Extreme Video plugin to easily embed Google videos in your Wordpress blog!

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to let it rip in the comments section, or drop me an email. Note that I cannot provide support for the plugin itself, I can only clarify any instructions I’ve provided here.

Please remember visit the plugin author’s site and let him know how much you appreciate his work!

For embedding YouTube videos, see my tutorial here:

How to embed YouTube videos in Wordpress with the Extreme Video plugin.

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