If a picture speaks a thousand words, then a video tells a million more. Having videos shared and embedded on your content or site would make your content and site look lively and better present your messages. Youtube appears to be one of the most common sources (besides that we have Vimeo and other video links). In our Youtube video tutorial, we have showed you the 3 simple ways you can do to embed a Youtube video into your content. But there are a lot of things we can do more than just an embedded video. Think about all other options like a video playlist, video slider or video background.
With the growth of WordPress plugins, yes we can do all the above things using third party plugins. From a long list of WordPress plugins, we have picked out 7 best WordPress video plugins for your site. Scroll down and explore them.
TubePress (Free & Premium)
With over 500,000 downloads, this highly downloaded WordPress TubePress plugin allows you to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos into your blog and create a beautiful video gallery page or sidebar widget. You can choose to display your YouTube channel, playlists or other random videos sorted by tags. The setup and configuration steps for this plugins is quite simple and straightforward. After configure the plugin into your site, simply use the shortcode [tubepress] in your post/page and your video gallery with TubePress will be nicely displayed.
TubePress is available both for Free and Premium. The premium version, TubePress Pro, has obviously more features, yet you should refer to the comparison between two versions to make your own decision. One minus point is that TubePress does not support responsive design. You need to meddle with the CSS code in your theme style file to achieve this feature. For more visual input, see at TubePress demo.
Contus Video Gallery (Free & Premium)
Contus Video Gallery serves to create a professional video gallery page on your WordPress site. The plugin is capable to turn your video gallery into an online FLV player right on your site. It supports to play FLV and H.264 encoded videos, including MP3, MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v and F4V. The plugin also supports option to add embed code based videos (like Youtube and Vimeo videos). This FLV plugin clearly has a surplus amount of features compared to TubePress plugin. These features include responsive design, RTL and social media comment, to name a few. You can visit the plugin info page for the list of features.
Responsive Video Embeds (Free)
Responsive Video Embeds plugin works like a charm, it inserts videos into a single article using the oEmbed technique of WordPress and resize your embed videos an iFrames to fit into different screen sizes. Once you activate the plugin, go to Settings > Media SubPanel and check the Auto-embeds checkbox and now all your embed videos will be resized automatically according to different screen sizes and devices. This plugin currently supports videos hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Scribd, WordPress.tv, hulu.com, Revision 3, WordPress.tv and so on. You can visit the demo site and test the plugin for yourself.
Video Gallery WordPress Plugin (For $15)
This $15 WordPress plugin by Digital Zoom studio is not only a video gallery but more like a media gallery where you can add videos, images and audios into the player. The plugin even supports loading your ads in the type of YouTube, video or image before the video plays. What I like most about Video Gallery WordPress plugin is that it allows you to remove the YouTube trademark and replace your own logo instead. Social sharing and embed code buttons are made to be visible and clickable on screen. Should you need to change any of its skin and appearance, this video plugin is highly customizable with its multiple skins and menu options. If you take time to learn its API and CSS, customizing everything is not a far stretch.
Youtube Channel Gallery (Free)
If you need a free and simple plugin with basic features for embedding YouTube playlist into your WordPress site, Youtube Channel Gallery is the one to go for. This WordPress video plugin supports displaying YouTube videos and a list of thumbnails according to user channel or playlist. You can customize everything from the video feed type, video quality, width, ratio, theme to other options for thumbnail and link settings. It provides shortcodes that can be used on single post, page or you can use the plugin as a widget as well.
Vixy YouTube Embed and Download (Free)
VIXY Youtube plugin allows you to embed Youtube videos on your site. The configuration part is simple then you can use the shortcode [youtube]<youtube video ID>[/youtube] to insert a video into your post. One interesting thing about this plugin is that it supports a Download link for your Youtube video. Plus, the plugin supports metadata added to video output which is good for SEO. Video comments display is supported as well.
WP-Backgrounds II (For €35,00+)
WP-Backgrounds II is a powerful premium plugin that allows you to add a fullscreen background image/video/YouTube video slideshow into your WordPress site, posts and custom post types. You can place as many YouTube videos into the slideshow as you like and choose to activate the background in certain posts/pages. It is also possible to assign different backgrounds to different places per your taste.
Fluid layout makes the background fully responsive and fit into various devices like desktops, tablets and smart phones. What impresses me most is that the plugin will use special backgrounds optimized for mobile users. When the plugin detects a mobile device through the browser agent, it will automatically serve the appropriate background to that viewer.
Did I miss any cool candidate in the list? Just comment and let me know.