If you attempted to upload an audio or video file to a post in WordPress, you may notice that all you get is a link to download the file. If you want the file to actually play, you’ll need to use an extra plugin.
By far, the most popular audio plugin is WordPress Audio Player. Video plugins are significantly less popular, probably because video files take up so much space and bandwidth, and it’s so easy to embed videos from external providers.
When embedding audio and video, I prefer to use the Degradable HTML5 Audio and Video Plugin. Sure, it may require some file conversion, but it’s a great way to embed both audio and video files that use the browser’s native (non-Flash) player while also providing the option of a Flash-based player for browsers that don’t support HTML5 embeds.
If you’d rather embed videos from an external provider, it’s easy to do (as mentioned above), but Viper’s Video Quicktags providers a few additional features and customizations, plus it uses XHTML-valid embeds, which most external providers tend to avoid for some strange reason.
Embedding audio and especially video opens your blog to a whole new world of content. Give it a try, you may enjoy it.
I use Vipers on 3.1-RC5 for embedding my own videos, as well as other sites, and for my needs, it’s the best of both worlds. I had some issues with HTML5 Degradable on 3.1 (it just stopped playing videos).
I usually just use YouTube or Vimeo but it drives me mad how YouTube embeds aren’t W3C compliant
For embedding, I like the Video Embedder plugin. It works well with WP 3.1, is compatible with most of the major video sites and its options page lets you automatically re-size all of the videos on your site. Perfect if you ever decide to change themes and need the videos to be wider, narrower, taller, or shorter.
http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....-embedder/
The Blubrry PowerPress plugin now has a nice HTML5 ready player. With the Mobile Podcaster iPhone/iPad app you can upload audio straight into your WordPress site and create a new post with the appropriate embed shortcode enclosures.
For video, I just embed YouTube videos, which is very practical unless your publishing a video podcast to iTunes.