Amazon S3 and WordPress

| March 1, 2010

In our last article I talked about using Amazon S3 to host your videos created by Camtasia Studio.  This method is easy when you are using a normal website and can just link to the video’s html page, which plays the movie.  But, what if you use something a little different like WordPress?

WordPress sites have become very popular over the years.  They are easy to build and customizable to work with most types of sites.  They allow for blogging like this and their ability to easily create RSS feeds to keep your readers up to date makes it appealing.  Now, combining  WordPress and Camtasia Studio produced videos can be a little challenging for the novice web designers.  Camtasia Studio, when it produces a video for the internet produces multiple files to include its very own html file.  In order to play the video it uses each file to add the Camtasia Studio specific items like callouts and captions.  Because of these extra files you can not just use a video plugin to show your video.  Well I guess you can if you want to lose your hotspots and interactivity.  This is where you need a little knowledge of embedding flash files.

First, you need a place to host your videos.  Amazon S3 is just one.  For more on this read our previous article Camtasia Studio and Amazon S3.  Once you have your videos uploaded you need to add them to your post on your WordPress site.  You can do this by using the Flash Player embedded coding.  Now I know what you are saying, “I am not a webmaster and don’t know what code to use!”  Well what if I told you there is a website that can do the majority of the work.  You need the SWFObject v2.0 HTML and JavaScript generator.  This site will generate the needed coding to add to your blog.  It is that easy.

The following video was added to this post using the same generator and is hosted on my Amazon S3 account.  The video also shows you just how to do this.

Note: This video is unedited. Click Here to view in a larger window

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Camtasia Studio and Amazon S3

| February 28, 2010

Creating a great video tutorial is often the easy part. The difficult part is deciding where to host it. There are many options of course. If you have a web host you can host them there for your website, but are you limited or charged by bandwidth? Will your videos be high demand for viewing? Well I know we hope so and we don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for this either. You can go the free route with YouTube or some of the other sites like this, but will that meet your needs? Techsmith of course has ScreenCast, which you can get a free or paid account with them. Another alternative is using Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 is a low cost hosting solution that I use. It enables me to host large video files, among other things, and is very simple to use. The cost is very low because you are charged pennies vs. dollars for your storage and bandwidth. To use Amazon S3 you will need a program that can access it. A free addon for the FireFox browser called S3Fox Organizer is easy to use like an FTP client. There are other good ones like Bucket Explorer by Chambal, which costs $49.99. Another great product is GoodSync, a software solution that will help you access your Amazon S3 account as well as synchronize files on your network and more. Pro version is $29.95.

To use Amazon S3, just upload your Video files. Videos created with Camtasia Studio have multiple files that go with it. All of these must be uploaded to the same directory or as Amazon S3 calls them “Buckets”. Once the files are uploaded you need to change the Authorization Level (ACL) to at minimum read for everyone. This will allow everyone the ability to watch your video. Then get the url to the html file that was uploaded. This is the url you will give out to your viewers. The method for getting the url is different for each program.

It is that simple.

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