Spreebie Transcoder – Resize, Compress and Store Video vs WP YouTube Lyte

The role of video as the premier mode of communication and information transmission in the year 2019 has now become uncontested. Video informs all aspects of our lives, from how we communicate with our loved ones to how radio stations stream content to their ‘listeners’. The monumental task for content providers today is to provide video in a manner in which it is accessible to everyone – not providing video is totally out of the question. A large part of this is of course driven by the all internet-based media distribution platforms that have sprouted up since 2005. Video has become so instrumental and so effective that it has even triggered the biggest learning cycle in human history. So, the important test for content providers is fundamentally related to access – global access. Pertaining to internet infrastructure, different places in the world are at different stages of development – all those people have to have access to the same content. Providing video at resolutions that deal with these scenarios can be what separates a content providers from their competition. The MP4 video format and FFmpeg have matured tremendously over the past 15 years. MP4 has become the de facto video format on the web and FFmpeg is the goto transcoding tool for some of the biggest video distribution platforms in the world. Just because of the lay of the land in 2019, it is important to use video on your site to interact with your visitors in ways that they can relate to and understand. Communicating in a standard way using the MP4 video format and making sure those videos can be provided in sizes and rates that respond to individual users’ needs and circumstances is imperative. WordPress is now running on 30% of all websites – in a way, it has become a kind of web operating system. This means that it has become unavoidable and thinking about creating new products and dedicated implementations of existing products for WordPress is imperative. The combination of better video transcoding technology, standard (popular) video containers, cloud storage services and a web dominated by a very powerful WordPress was fertile soil to create Spreebie Transcoder. Features Resizing – Spreebie Transcoder resizes video to lesser resolutions. For example, a 360p video will get 240p and 144p copies. Compression – Spreebie Transcoder has adjustable settings to determine the quality of video and the speed at which transcoding happens. This results in compression to varying degrees depending on what settings have been chosen. Google Cloud Storage – If you choose to, transcoded video can be stored on Google Cloud Storage as a backup. Folders – Spreebie Transcoder supports WP Real Media Library that brings folder functionality to WordPress media. Support and Manual – Spreebie Transcoder provides a support tab through which users can request support from Spreebie representatives. A comprehensive manual is also provided to help users with most of the questions they may have. This plugin requires FFmpeg to work. THIRD PARTY PRODUCT AND SERVICE NOTE: When storing already transcoded video on the cloud with this plugin, a third party service called Google Cloud Storage (https://cloud.google.com/storage/) is used for storage. A number of open-source PHP libraries from various sources are packaged within Spreebie Transcoder in the folder “vendor” in order to facilitate Google Cloud Storage functionality. Google Cloud Storage in this plugin ONLY works for cloud storage – the rest of the plugin can function without it. Another third party product which is not included with this plugin but is its centre is FFmpeg is (https://www.ffmpeg.org/) – this is used to perform all the video analysis and transcoding. Without FFmpeg, this plugin cannot function. The last third party product that can be used in tandem with this plugin but is not included with it is WP Real Media Library (https://matthias-web.com/wordpress/real-media-library/). This can be used to organise your transcoded media into folders. Spreebie Transcoder does not need WP Real Media Library to function.

WP YouTube Lyte allows you to “lazy load” your video’s, by inserting responsive “Lite YouTube Embeds”. These look and feel like normal embedded YouTube, but only call the “fat” YouTube-player when clicked on, thereby reducing download size & rendering time substantially when embedding YouTube occasionally and improving page performance dramatically when you’ve got multiple YouTube video’s on one and the same page. The plugin can be configured to cache YouTube thumbnails locally, improving both performance and privacy. As such LYTE embedded YouTube videos do not require requests to the YouTube servers, probably (I am not a lawyer) allowing for better GDPR-compliance. The plugin picks up on normal YouTube links, taking over from WordPress core’s oEmbed. Alternatively you can add a YouTube-link for a video or an entire playlist with “httpv” instead of “http(s)” or add a Lyte widget to your sidebar and WP YouTube Lyte replaces that link with the correct performance-optimized code. Some examples: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY (normal video embed) httpv://youtu.be/_SQkWbRublY (video embed with youtube-shortlink) httpa://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY (audio only embed) httpv://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA486E741B25F8E00 (playlist embed) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY#stepSize=-1 (video player, one size smaller than what’s configured as default) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQkWbRublY?start=20&showinfo=0 (video player, start playing at 20 seconds and don’t show title) Or using shortcodes: [lyte id='_SQkWbRublY' /] [lyte id='_SQkWbRublY' audio='true' /] [lyte id='A486E741B25F8E00' playlist='true' /] WP YouTube Lyte has been written with optimal performance as primary goal, but has been tested for maximum browser-compatibility (iPad included) while keeping an eye on accessibility. Starting with version 1.2.0 lyte embeds are fully responsive and can automatically embed videoObject microdata as well. The plugin is fully multi-language, with support for Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Romanian, Spanish and Slovene. Feedback is welcome; see info in the faq for bug reports/ feature requests and feel free to rate and/or report on compatibility on wordpress.org.