Adding Video

Adding Video to Joomla (or any site, really)

Adding video to your website should be really easy... but unfortunately it's more complicated than it sounds, mostly because of the lack of uniform video format standards for playing videos directly in browsers.

The situation has improved over recent years with most modern browsers supporting the direct playing of MP4 video format, some older browsers may still require different formats and/or embedded players.

Added to this, you also need to consider the impact on your hosting - video files can be large, sometimes hundreds of megabytes. Storage is not necessarily an issue - most hosting plans will provide sufficient storage space for a moderate number of videos, but there is the issue of bandwidth.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that may be transmitted (downloaded or streamed) through your hosting account over a given period of time. Most hosting packages, particularly low cost ones, have strict limits on bandwidth consumption.

The most common way around this is to host your video on a 3rd party streaming service, such as YouTube or Vimeo. Both YouTube and Vimeo have a number of advantages:

  • Automatic file conversion - when you upload your video, it is automatically converted into the various formats required for different browsers, with the player automatically delivering the correct format
  • Basic video hosting is free - there is no impact on your website hosting package. Even if the video is embedded on your site it is streamed from YouTube or Vimeo and is not included in your hosting storage or bandwidth.
  • There is an SEO benefit, in that your video will appear in YouTube or Vimeo video search (unless you make it private)

If you are not too worried about appearing on YouTube, and don't want ads or other other video recommendations appearing on your videos, then Vimeo is a better option. If you wish to keep better control of how your videos are displayed, customising the player, and your branding, we recommend setting up a Vimeo Pro account - the small additional fee is well worth the spend.  

So how do you actually go about adding a video?

Option 1 - Self hosting

If you are planning on storing your video on your own hosting, the JCE Editor we install as standard on our sites has an 'Insert Media' option. The button is normally on the bottom row of the toolbar, and looks like a movie film strip. If it is not shown, it can be added from the JCE options, and if you are not sure how to do that for you, we can enable it for you.

This will allow you to upload your video, and embed it in an article or module.

Option 2 - External hosting on Vimeo or YouTube

For simplicity, we recommend using the Joomlashack plugins:

https://www.joomlashack.com/joomla-extensions/osvimeo/

https://www.joomlashack.com/joomla-extensions/osyoutube/

There are free and paid for PRO versions of both plugins. The PRO versions have an enhanced set of features and priority support, worth consideration!