Move Over JWPlayer…S3Bubble In Da House!

Undoubtedly one of the biggest pains in the gluteus for you as an online marketer is setting up your online video. That’s because you want your video player to do several key things at once.

Your video player should be able to:

• Stream your videos quickly through Amazon CloudFront
• Require only one video file to play correctly (as opposed to a whopping 3 files that the default OptimizePress player expects you to provide).
• Play your videos on all devices and all browsers (is that really too much to ask?!)
• Offer ‘true’ streaming, which loads the video dynamically (as opposed to progressively)
• Allow viewers to seek anywhere in the video without waiting for that part to load
• Protect the stream link from being downloaded and shared using the Amazon S3 security features

Aaaand, you don’t want to get a brain cramp and spend 18 hours just to get the freaking thing up and running. In my mind, this process should be dead simple, no matter how much of a tech retard one may be.

Up until now, the free solution I’ve been recommending to my clients is the JWPlayer. It does all of the above with the exception of protecting the stream link from freeloaders. I even have several tutorials on this very site that show you how to set up streaming video with the JWPlayer.

But it’s complicated. No matter how good my tutorials are, the fact remains that there are a bunch of steps you have to follow in order to get the player set up correctly. Further, you have to deal with Javascript code snippets and get the syntax just right or your video won’t play. Or it’ll play on desktops and not play on mobile. Or the true streaming won’t work. Or, or, or…

One tiny little oversight and you’ll spend hours trying to figure out why the hell it isn’t working.

In other words, there’s too much friction. 

The other streaming video solution I’ve been recommending to my clients who can afford it is EasyVideoSuite. EVS does all of the things on the list above and much more. But it ain’t cheap. We’re talkin’ $297 for the base software plus another $97 to remove their branding from your videos (click here to read my review of EasyVideoSuite – opens in a new tab).

I still recommend EasyVideoSuite because it compresses all your videos for you and really exonerates you of doing anything technical. But not everybody wants to drop $400 smackers on a video app.

Enter S3Bubble

With a name like S3Bubble, it’s gotta be awesome. And actually, it is.

In a word, S3Bubble is the free answer to EasyVideoSuite. Unlike EVS, it won’t compress your videos for you. But it will allow you to serve ‘true streaming’ videos via Amazon CloudFront in an unbranded player, and it will protect your video links from those pesky freeloaders.

It’s also a heck of a lot easier to set up than JWPlayer.

You just sign up for a free account, follow the instructions on the S3Bubble site (opens in a new tab), install the WordPress plugin, and click the S3Bubble icon in your WordPress editor to embed videos on your posts or pages. And yes, you can embed S3Bubble videos into the OptimizePress ‘video’ and ‘video lightbox’ elements!

You can embed S3Bubble into both the regular video element and the video lightbox element.

Here’s how:

==> Generate the S3bubble shortcode as you normally would
==> Add a video element to your page
==> Under ‘type’ select ‘embed code’ (screenshot: http://prntscr.com/4gkp7v )
==> Paste your shortcode into the field
==> Enjoy sexy streaming video!

So there you go! If you need any help setting it up or have any questions, just leave your comment below and I’ll pop in to help out.

• Have a skins preview feature on the main S3Bubble config page so you know what skin you’re getting
• Choose brand color, theme, aspect ratio on a per-video basis
• Hide controls during playback
• Make control bar not part of the video frame (otherwise you’re blocking the bottom of the video while waiting for it to disappear)
• Fix distracting, seizure-inducing load bar buffering visual style
• Include ‘select thumbnail’ option in Wordpress editor shortcode generation dialogue