Although most sites provide you with a means to embed videos within your blog, I never found the process to be particularly reliable: Half the time WordPress would do something odd to the embed code and the video would not show. So it was with great joy I found the following plugin:

Wp-Video

Obviously English is not the plugin authors first language, so some detail is lacking, but installation is so simple it doesn’t matter. Simply download the plugin, extract and upload it to your blog, then activate it from the dashboard. Now, all you have to do is place the following syntax into a blog post to make the video show:

[video]VIDEOURL[/video ]

All of the major sites provide a permalink to their videos, and that’s all you need to post in between the [video] commands. Wp-Video is also fairly configurable and allows you to add such things as the video duration and to give your readers the option to download the video.

Audio Player

In a similar vein, the Audio Player plugin from 1 Pixel Out enables you to embed mp3 audio tracks into your blog posts. Install and activate, and like the video plugin, you just need to drop this simple syntax into your blog post:

[audio:FILENAME.mp3]

Obviously you need to upload the track in question to your webspace prior to embedding it. The player is configurable for a number of parameters, including appearance.

There are certainly other ways to do this, and other plugins, but I’ve found these to be simple and effective. Recommended.