FreeIQ is great, mostly. But I’ve hit a problem that may be a dealbreaker for me.

When you embed their player at your site, the title screen shows “FreeIQ”. Besides the obvious unprofessionalism, my biggest problem with this is that, if I have a video “above the fold” on my homepage, then the black FreeIQ screen is going to dramatically change the look of the page. Unless I can get the video player to look good and contribute to the page — even before it starts playing, I don’t want it there.

So I guess I’m back to using Flash and self-hosting the videos, but can I do that in WordPress?

I researched plugins and found the “Kimili Flash Embed for WordPress” plugin. I’m going to try it with an eye to:

  • Does it include a player? I don’t really need one since that is generated with my Camtasia files.

Answer: no player included, it just loops round and round with no ability to pause or anything.

  • Is it a pain to use? I’ve got to come up with something that shortens the tutorial-generation time.

Anwer: not a pain at all. very nice functionality, but doesn’t seem intended for video play.

Other info on kimili: won’t play a .flv file.

Before I go on, here are links to the pages that seem to have relevant info to what I’m trying:

http://www.w3schools.com/flash/flash_inhtml.asp

plug-in for embedding flash in WordPress

wordpress forum discussion on embedding flash

flash video onto a blog

Okay, so i’ve decided that trying to use a 3rd party player is more trouble than it’s worth. Isn’t there a way to simply call the nice Camtasia file family into my WP page?

I tried simply inserting the javascript command from the Camtasia html file. It didn’t work.

Let’s try putting a <?php include("filename.html"); ?> call into a WP entry. The only problem i foresee is that camtasia’s output html file has a head and body of it’s own. Let’s just try it.

Doesn’t work. I just tried every iteration I could think of for the filename and it just doesn’t call it in. I even tried <!–#include virtual=”http://fineremodel.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/njhtest.html” –>, which is a Server Side Include, which should work from an html page, but in wordpress it doesn’t seem to.

My journey to good web video continues as I try the option of just putting up a static picture that is a link to the video, then have the video come in as a pop-up box to play in a separate window.