One of the things that struck me the most about the release of WordPress 2.7 late Wednesday night, had nothing to do with WordPress 2.7 at all. It was that nifty video walkthrough presented in the post. The player was attractive and functional and the video quality was impressive.

I dug a little bit and found out that that’s a newish feature available to WordPress.com users. It requires a paid space upgrade of either 5 GB ($20/year), 15 GB ($50/year), or 25 GB ($90/year) to your WordPress.com blog. Users have access to unlimited bandwidth, which seemed a bit suspect to me, but I got in touch with a WordPress rep and was assured that “unlimited bandwidth” really means exactly that.

So I bit the bullet, created a new WordPress.com blog under my existing site account, and dropped $20 on 5 GB of space, just so I could check out what the video service was like. I filled out my credit card information through a subsequent Paypal screen and my account was credited with the space instantly.

After messing around with the video functionality for most of the day, I feel like I can present a reasonable critique.

The Good

-It’s incredibly easy to use. From the ‘Post Screen’ of your WordPress.com blog, hit ‘Add Video’, navigate to the file with either the Flash or traditional uploader, and watch as it uploads and crunches your vid. You can also upload from the ‘Add Media’ screen in the dashboard, but it lacks the fancy progress bar that’s present from the ‘Post Screen.’

-I tested about ten different videos, all different bit-rates, resolutions, and file types. The system uploaded, compressed, and outputted eight of them without incident.

-Shortcode WordPress.com embed is a nifty feature.

The Bad

-The system had trouble compressing some .wmv files. I converted them to .avi in VirtualDub first, which WordPress had no issues with.

-Wordpress does a great job with documentation in general, but there’s very little in the way of documentation for the video player. It might just be because there’s not a whole lot of customization you can do anyway…

-There’s no way to customize the player itself; you’re stuck with the default layout and color. Which means you can’t get rid of the WordPress ‘W’ overlay. Which means it’s not practical for anything other than some minor personal applications. The only options you can change in the shortcode are the width and height of the video (w= and h=). It doesn’t feel like it has a very well-rounded feature set.

-Shortcode doesn’t appear to work on WordPress blogs not hosted on WordPress.com

Conclusion

For 99% of users, the WordPress.com video player is perfect. The uploader/processor handles almost anything you can throw at it, the whole system is easy and intuitive to use, and it creates an attractive and functionality player. Unfortunately, my major issues with the player preclude it from serving as a fully-functional video service. But then again, WordPress doesn’t claim it’s built to serve this purpose.

For the amount I’ve used WordPress over the years, I don’t feel too bad about sending $20 their way. I also now have a pretty useful video player at my fingertips whenever I want it.

But for some of the bigger, more commercial projects I have in mind that this service would have been extremely useful for? It looks like I’ll have to continue looking elsewhere.

Examples

Here are two videos I uploaded to my WordPress.com blog. I’m embeding them here with the included shortcode. These videos were provided directly from 2K and Valve, respectively. I haven’t compressed or edited them before uploading them to WordPress.com

BioShock PlayStation 3 Trailer (Standard Size)

Shortcode: [wpvideo rpEWDx0K]
Link to post, with forced size adjustment examples: rebellionmedia.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/bioshock-playstation-3-trailer/

Left 4 Dead TV Spot (Standard Size)

Shortcode: [wpvideo LaWm5JN7]
Link to post, with forced size change examples: rebellionmedia.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/l4d-tv-spot/