Spreebie Transcoder – Resize, Compress and Store Video vs WP HTTP Compression

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.

This plugin allows your WordPress blog to output pages compressed in gzip format if a browser supports compression. HTTP compression generally means a 60-80% REDUCTION in the size of your pages (broadband usage) as well as an INCREASE in download speeds of 3x to 4x. To test if your blog is using compression use the following link: http://ismyblogworking.com/ Check “Page GZip” on the right hand size. Check “Bandwidth saved by compression” on the left hand side. NOTE: This plugin should not be used alongside WP Super Cache or WP Cache since those plugins are already implementing compression. Your blog will keep working but those plugins will stop caching new pages. RECENT NEWS – 20 March 2010: Its been reported by a user that there is a conflict using WP HTTP Compression together with Google Analytics Plugin (3.2.5). I’ll to look into this and release a patch for next release. Note that this conflict is NOT with Google Analytics itself but with the PLUGIN. Google Analytics scripts and stat collection have been tested and work fine with the WP HTTP Compression plugin.