Yesterday I announced that my YouTube Embed WordPress plugin would include EmbedPlus. But what exactly is it?

First of all, let me explain YouTube embedding.

If you have your own website or blog chances are that you’ve uploaded or seen a video that you’d really like to add to your site.

Well, YouTube, via an “Embed” button next to the video, provide the code you need to do this. You can also switch on and off different options to configure exactly how you’d like it to appear.

What you end up with is a video on your site that offers the same options as it would have on the YouTube site.

Step forward EmbedPlus – they provide alternative embedding code that will add extra functionality to the resulting video. To achieve this the YouTube video is converted to Flash and delivered via EmbedPlus themselves – if the viewers device doesn’t support Flash then EmbedPlus will fall back to the standard YouTube embed code.

The additional options that EmbedPlus adds includes…

• Instant Replay – replay an event soon after it happens.
• Slow Motion – instantly watch videos at a slower rate to more clearly see what happens.
• Movable Zoom – added accessibility. Dynamically magnifies the area you point over. Use it to get a close look at objects, writing, and things like moving athletes.
• Crop – cut/splice/chop only the particularly interesting part of a video to show during playback.
• Scene Skipping – like DVD chapter buttons, click these to skip to marked times.
• Real-time Reactions – enable this button to show viewers the latest Internet reactions, right inside the player

If all of this wasn’t enough they now have a great new feature named Sweet Spot Marking. If you don’t use the Scene Skipping function this will create markers in the video based on social references. In other words they automatically analyse discussions about the video and mark positions in the video that people are talking about.

To demonstrate this functionality, below are 2 videos. The first uses the standard YouTube embedding and the latter uses EmbedPlus.

EmbedPlus is still a “work in progress” however, and they are promising further features soon. They’d be really interested in feedback so please feel free to contact them.

I’m proud to announce the release of version 1.4 of my YouTube Embed plugin for WordPress.

Although a simple 0.1 upgrade from the previous release, the changes made are quite substantial and adds a lot of new functionality.

First up, multiple widgets are now supported. This has meant the widget code being completely re-written but now you can have as many YouTube sidebar widgets as you want!

Next, the plugin can now extract, parse and output any annotations available for a video.

A new parameter has also been added which allows you to suppress the “back links” from the video to YouTube.

Lastly, the plugin now supports EmbedPlus. EmbedPlus is a Flash extension to the existing YouTube embedding and adds a number of new features, such as real-time reactions, DVD-like controls, and more. This isn’t switched on by default and you can happily embed “standard” videos if you wish.

None-the-less, EmbedPlus is becoming a hot new technology, and I’m happy to be partening with them to provide this feature.

All the plugin details are available from the dedicated page.

A quick enhancement for Simple Draft List, which lets you list draft posts (or pages) on your WordPress blog.

When draft posts and/or pages are listed, and the viewer is an editor, then links will be added to be able to edit them – this link simply sends them to the post/page edit.

Full details and downloads are available on the dedicated plugin page.