This is a guest post by Tay Omojokun, the developer of this plugin so he may be a little biased in his reporting, take it away Tay:

EmbedPlus: Advanced YouTube Embedding in WordPress

Bloggers looking to customize video embedding in WordPress should check out a unique plugin for YouTube offered by EmbedPlus. Beyond the basic ability to embed a YouTube video using links, EmbedPlus adds several customizable features that the standard YouTube player does not provide. Below is a couple of screenshot illustrating some of these features.

Features

Here are the important features listed:

• DVD-like controls
  • Chapters (custom and social)
  • Instant Replay
  • Slow Motion
  • Looping (scene and whole video)
• Video Reactions/Comments (optional)
  • Reddit (Highest scoring submissions)
  • Google+ (Most recent posts)
  • Twitter (Most recent posts)
  • Digg (Most “Dugg”)
  • YouTube (Most recent comments)
• Timed-Annotations (with link support for calls-to-action)

Demo

Before installing the plugin, take a look at the demo provided on the EmbedPlus homepage that enhances a popular TED Talk video on deep sea creatures. There, you can directly play with the listed features and see how they might help engage your visitors. For example, as the home page demo and screenshot above show, the annotations feature can be used to support calls-to-action that can motivate visitors to take part in a given campaign (e.g. mail list signup).

Beyond the demo, you can experience these features with other videos using the service’s new Chrome Extension for YouTube and a video-rich language learning project the team is exploring: How to pronounce words / Pronunciación en Inglés / Pronuncia in Inglese…

Usage

To install the plugin, simply download it from here and within seconds, you’re up and running. Using it becomes a matter of just pasting links in the rich-text editor as displayed below.

To make customizations like annotations and chapters, simply click the added EmbedPlus button on the editor toolbar and a wizard is launched right within your WordPress interface. After entering your edits (e.g. chapter times), you’ll get short code to paste on your blog that encapsulates them. Below, you’ll see a screenshot of the wizard’s start button and an example short code that is generated at the end of the wizard.

The EmbedPlus team is eager to get feedback here. You’ll see a Google chat badge that the team will be checking for questions, frequently and periodically.

Neil’s Two Pennys’ Worth

I wish I had seen this plugin when I was first building my coaching videos.  They are an hour long and the ability to skip to a chapter would be brilliant for my coaching clients.  Is it youtube Only??  Perhaps I could chunk up my videos and upload them to youtube so I can save on Amazon S3 costs.

Thanks Tay I’ll be giving this a trial very soon.