I got tired of my XML-RPC posts with QuickTime movies messing up the design of my blog. WordPress automatically adds paragraph breaks embed and object tags. This plugin corrects that behavior and doesn’t require the user to know how to create those tags. Additionally, starting with version 1.3b, this plugin uses JavaScript to get around the ActiveX alert on Windows versions of IE.
To install, download and extract the zip file. Upload the two files to your WordPress plugins folder (not including the directory). Once it is there, you can activate it from the WP administration pages.
After it is installed, you can us the following syntax to embed a QuickTime movie in a post:
[QUICKTIME http://www.xxxx.com/quicktime.mov 320 257]
or to use a poster frame or movie (in version 1.1b and above):
[QUICKTIME http://x.com/quicktime.mov http://x.com/poster.mov 320 257]
Always start with a bracket “[” followed by “QUICKTIME” then the path to the file, the width and the height. End with a closing bracket “]”.
A couple of notes about “poster frames/movies”: It should be the case that you can just use a jpeg or other image file as a poster movie as QuickTime can handle those formats. Unfortunately, this confuses several browsers so it is best to stick with using a movie as a poster movie.
Here is the one that I have started to use Here is a page that you can see it in action on.
To create your own, create a JPEG or GIF or PNG file and open it up with QuickTime Pro and “Save As” a “Self Contained Movie”.
One other thing to be conscious of regarding poster movies is that WordPress may be confused by them and not put the appropriate “enclosure” in your RSS feed for applications like FireAnt. This may or may not be a problem but is worth being aware of.
Starting with version 1.2b, I have implemented the ability to specify whether or not the video should auto start/autoplay and/or have a controller. To use these two options you would form the tag as follows:
[QUICKTIME http://x.com/quicktime.mov 320 257 true false]
The first “true” or “false” value is whether or not it should auto play and the second is whether or not a controller should be visible.
One thing that you should note is that it doesn’t really make sense to use a poster movie with movies that don’t auto play and it doesn’t really make sense to not have a controller for movies that don’t auto play.
If you like this script or are having problems with it, let me know, leave a comment below.
Of course, updates and additions to the script are appreciated. If you are interested, I use it at: MobVCasting and Open Vlog.
Last, if you are looking for a similar solution that will work with Flash and Windows Media as well as QuickTime and not only WordPress but Blogger and other places, check out Enric’s videos Playing In Place
You might also be interested in the latest tool that I have been working on for WordPress, a video commenting plugin
Last, here is a new version (actually, not a version of this but a complete rewrite with different capabilities, meaning don’t remove this plugin when you install the new one, your original videos will probably stop working): New QuickTime Audio/Video Posting Plugin for WordPress
Jon from jonirvine.com, did you happen to figure out what the issue is? If not, let me know, I will take a look.
Thanks for a helpful plugin, i’m using it on my site.
freaking awesome! thanks!
I downloaded the plug in, activated it and am putting the tags just like instructed, but nothing shows up at all in the post?
Any possible reasons?
Mike
Hey, thanks for the sweet plugin, I am using a page template to pull posts from a catogory to display on my page. When I post the quicktime line to the category it comes up in the page just as the typed line. Any ideas on how I can make this work.
Thanks
What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
Thanks.
Thank you for the Quicktime plugin. Fully functional and simple to set up.
what a wonderful plugin thank you…
Hi,
I use your plugin to play a quicktime-file inside my wordpress-blog, but unfortunatelly, it does not work. I made a mov-file out of the wasserlilien-image given by xp … and included that code in my wordpress-blog:
[QUICKTIME http://www.2atlantis.de/Wasserlilien.mov 640 496]
but it does not work …
Can you help me?
Thanks for this plugin, it’s great. It worked straight away and will save loads me time updating my doco site,
so thanks and keep up the good work :)
Wanted to point out that I put up another plugin, very similar to this for Windows Media: http://www.walking-productions.com/WindowsMediaPostWPP/
Hi:
First of all, congratulations for your plug in!!
. I have a podcast site, and some are m4a and mov files. When I load a category page (for example, http://www.podcaster.cl/category/djs/radio-guerritas/), it look like the quicktime file loads completely… I need to be a very light page. I used your “false true” suggestions, so it won’t start automatically… but it appears that it starts loading automatically, so the page gets real slow.
Do you know if it’s possible for the files not to start loading ??
Greetings from Chile
Hi Alejandro,
The “poster frame” should prevent the page from loading really slowly as the video doesn’t actually display. Are you finding that the page just doesn’t show or that it shows but continues loading?
In any case, I would suggest using a pop-up window or a more elegant/complex javascript solution such as offered by vPIP. Sorry this plugin is meant to be really simple and doesn’t handle things like that. On the other hand, you could probably hack that in pretty easily by making an “on click” on an image and loading the QuickTime tags there. You will probably need to wrap a div around it all.
Hope that helps somewhat..
Thanks for that! Help us to much!!! =D
Do you know why nothing is happening? I can the embed code on the page but nothging loads.
http://byu.emailstar.com/?p=14
Any help would be great. Thanks!
Hi TheCrow,
Looks like it is working now.. Do you know what the problem was?
This plug-in seems to conflict with the “youtube brackets” plug-in that provides a similar function. This is for WP 2.
Ooh.. Yes, that is a big conflict. I will write to the “youtube brackets” developer and ask him to change his variable and function names (he used this plugin as a starting point and seems to have kept all of the same names).
Great plugin! I’m having a bit of trouble getting the kiosk mode to work though. I added the necessary code you posted above but it still has the option to save it by simple right click. Any ideas? Website is at alexissdawn dot com / blog
Hi Alexiss,
I think you missed part of the instructions:
add the following code around line 150:
$tag_line = “<param name=\”KIOSKMODE\” VALUE=\”true\” />”;
$tags .= $tag_line . “\n”;
$script_tags .= “ourTags+='” . $tag_line . “‘;\n”;
Currently, it is working in kioskmode for people not using IE but the above will make it work for IE as well.
Let me know if that works out for you..
Shawn,
Cool plugin… thanks.
I don’t really need it – but it’s nice to know it’s out there. :-)
I tried putting a Quicktime movie just like you said but nothing appears.
The site looks great ! Thanks for all your help ( past, present and future !)
I added the code at about line 150 but kiosk mode is still not working in IE. It is in everything else though. I have cleared the cache and tried on a couple of different computers but still no kiosk mode for IE. Any ideas? (I hate IE…)
Scratch that. I’ve managed to fix it! Thanks for all your help and this plugin. :)
Hi Alexiss,
Glad you got it going. Please let me know if there is anything I missed in the instructions regarding Kiosk mode that I should have included.
-shawn
Please, give me contact address (email or msn) of this site administrator…
Thanks!
To all of you newbies like me who can’t get it to work, try deactivating other QT plugins that you may have installed. That seemed to do something for me. At least.
Great plugin, saved me hours of grief!
Hi Niels,
Would you mind listing the other plugins? I would like to look through and see if I can figure out what caused the conflict.
Thanks
Hi Jim. Photos i received. Thanks
Thanks for the plugin, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for but I get a plugin error at random times that crashes IE on me and other times it works like it should.
I was reading that IE doesnt like embeded video and needs the object tag for it to play nice but I dont know where to add it into the html or if it would even help.
Any ideas?
Thanks
Hi Chris,
That is definitely strange behavior. Do you have any sense of when it crashes? Can you make it crash by doing something in particular?
The plugin uses both the object and embed tags so I don’t think that is the problem. It is using a very standard way of showing video in a page so things shouldn’t really be unstable. Is it possible that it is more of a QuickTime/IE issue than an issue with this plugin? Does the browser seem to crash on other sites?
Let me know..
I can’t get the plugin to work. I see the embedded stuff when I view the source of the page, but I don’t see the player. Here’s the HTML as it’s generated (I’ve changed the URL of the Quicktime below because I’m not allowed to make the video public):
';
ourTags+='';
ourTags+='';
ourTags+='';
ourTags+='';
ourTags+='';
ourTags+='';
if (typeof writeTags == "undefined") { document.write(theTags);} else {writeTags(ourTags);
}//-->
Hi Jamie,
Any chance you have javascript turned off on your browser? It should still work but just wondering..
QuickTime as well, you must have QuickTime installed. Perhaps re-installing QuickTime if it was installed before your browser.
Also, if you could send over the platform and version along with browser and QuickTime versions that would help..
-shawn
Hi Shawn- Love your plugin, but I’m having a small problem. My poster movie is being scaled larger to take up the space given, just as is expected, but when you click on the poster movie to load the actual movie, it loads and plays at the original unscaled size. You can see an example here: http://www.natecarroll.com/2007/06/08/i-made-lamps/
If you have any suggestions to remedy this, I’d love to hear!
(Also, on the 1.3.5 version of your plugin, I was getting a parse error- variable theTags cannot be found, but I got the plugin working by substituting “ourTags” for “theTags” in the following snippet. )
if (typeof writeTags == "undefined") { document.write(theTags);} else {writeTags(ourTags);}//-->
Nate,
Thanks for pointing out the typo with “theTags” vs. “ourTags”. I fixed that.
Unfortunately, it means that something is wrong and that the writeTags function which is required to get around the IE/EOLAS patent issues isn’t found. Generally this is due to putting it in the wrong place or putting the files inside of a folder in the plugins folder. Both files should just be placed in the plugins folder and not inside any other folders.
For everyone else: I just updated the plugin, fixing two issues, one with Firefox and the embed tag and one with the typo Nate identified.
Still working on the scale issue…
hi Shawn,
great plugin! I tried to be clever with the posterframe and created one 16 pixels bigger the the actual movie and I put “click on image to play” where the controls would be. it didn’t work since it seems the bigger posterframe got rescaled to fit the original movie size and therefore still displays the controls. is there a way to make this work?
thanks,
MAx