Viper’s Video Quicktags WordPress Plugin Discontinued

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I’m officially discontinuing my Viper’s Video Quicktags WordPress plugin. It was one of the first plugins I ever wrote over 10 years ago. Back then embedding videos into WordPress posts was a chore and so I wrote the plugin to make the life of authors much easier.

Since then a lot has changed, namely the inclusion of native support in WordPress for even easier embeds, a feature that I actually contributed myself to WordPress.

Unfortunately users of my Video Quicktags plugin have been forced to keep the plugin activated so that embeds in old posts continue to work. Without the plugin, the shortcodes that the plugin created would cease working. So recently I wrote and released a tiny replacement plugin that creates those same shortcodes but has the native WordPress embed functionality handle the actual embedding of content.

If you are a Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin user, then I strongly recommend that you install my new plugin and then delete Viper’s Video Quicktags.

Besides switching away from a plugin I no longer support, advantages of the replacement plugin are modern, HTML5 embeds instead of Adobe Flash as well as automatic width to fit most themes, rather than fixed width independent of what theme you’re using.

It should be noted that the new plugin does not include the YouTube, Vimeo, etc. buttons in the editor but those are redundant due to how easy it is to embed videos directly from WordPress now — just paste the video’s URL on its own line.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments below.

77 thoughts on “Viper’s Video Quicktags WordPress Plugin Discontinued”

  3. Thanks for this great plugin and also especially for the effort of creating a migration plugin and not just abandoning it! I have been using Viper’s Video Quicktags for many years. One question though, do I have to keep the migration plugin always activated now? I assumed it would rewrite the video embeds and then also could be deactivated?

    • Yes, you need to keep the migration plugin active. It’s a very small plugin with minimal performance impact though. Updating old posts is possible but more likely to cause bugs so I opted to go this route instead.

  5. First of all I need to thank you for your plugin. I used it for several years now to play flash videos with your [flv] tag. Worked great and still does. The thing is, that I have probably a couple of hundred flash videos, still using VQ to play them. If I follow your advice to use the new plugin, the flash videos don’z work anymore… of course.

    How is it to just add the flv part to this new plugin so that I can delete VQ?

    Thank you very much and best regards,
    bert

    • Thanks for the reminder about that. For this new plugin, I opted to not directly add support for FLV files as it was a pain to do in the old plugin and I wanted to keep the migration plugin very simple and stripped down.

      Instead any plugin that extends the native embed functionality built into WordPress to make it also support FLV files should make those work again.

      I may just throw together a separate plugin to do that though for people like yourself. I’d likely switch to a different player though because the license of the old player (JW Player) isn’t compatible with WordPress so I can’t bundle it (you used to have to manually install it). There’s open-source alternatives that I’ll look at.

  8. Uh-oh, the migrator doesn’t seem to be working for me. Nothing shows up on 5 years worth of videos embedded in various posts on my blog – unless I go through by hand and change the [youtube] or [vimeo] etc to [embed]. What have I done wrong?

    • Hmm, that’s not good and I can’t reproduce that. Behind the scenes, that’s pretty much all my plugin does — it makes [youtube] and such be aliases for [embed] (same code handles both now). What if you edit a post that’s not working and save it without changing anything? Does it work then?

      • Nope. But maybe this has to do with the fact that I’ve always – automatically – centered the Viper Video embeds whenever I’ve made them. I ask because it has turned out that just changing the tags to [embed]/[\embed] isn’t enough to get the video to show up. I also have to move the link to the left hand margin, either before changing the tags or afterward. If this is true, it doesn’t help me much in terms of getting everything running again, but I always feel better if I at least know WHY something isn’t working and maybe it’ll help you too.

  10. thanks, but an error clicking on the link : Forbidden Error Page

    If you arrived here due to a search or clicking on a link click your Browser’s back button to return to the previous page. Thank you.

  11. Thanks for your plugin. I was very useful to me. But now I have a problem: I have installed your new plugin and disabled the other, and the videos doesn’t appear in my posts. It’s possible that this happens because I don’t have the ultimate version of WP installed? Migrator is compatible with my version, but maybe make an error.

    Sorry by my bad english. I hope you understand me and you can help me.
    Thx.

    • In a strange way, I feel better now that I know I’m not the only one with this problem. My question now is, will everything work as it did if I reinstall the old plugin? If so, where can I find it? A helpful “assistant” deleted it from my site last night and I’m not seeing it as an available WP plugin online anymore.

      Thanks!

  12. Hi Larry. i also have the same problem. I have the latest WP version. this is an example of a Youtube code that don’t work with this migration plugin : [youtube width="420" height="315"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAKPq24MddA[/youtube]. So i just deactivated the Migration plugin, reactivate the old one and now i will insert videos the new way as pmdmaritz wrote.

  13. Hi everyone! If you have Jetpack installed and the “Shortcode Embeds” module enabled, please make sure to update my plugin to version 1.1.0. It should resolve the issue of disappearing embeds. Jetpack was trying to parse the shortcodes but couldn’t understand the format that my plugin used. My plugin now tells Jetpack to let it handle those shortcodes and things should work as expected now!

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  17. Ohhhh I Install this plugin over 8 years ago … thanks for being part of Internet history for me. ! Thanks alot!

  18. Like Richard, this was always the first plugin I would install on a new WP installation. I think I first installed it a decade ago in my blog, when it was the hottest thing on the Internet 🙂 I’m sorry to see it going, but yes, for the past years I’ve just kept it around because I feared it would break all those old links… many for self-hosted videos (I don’t always trust ‘external services’… they tend to come and go 🙂 ).

    And yes, Viper, you made history! Thanks for the ‘replacement’ though; it seems to work nicely for me.

  19. It says a lot about you that you haven’t just abandoned us all but have kept up your old plugin and now have provided this migration plugin.

    I am truly impressed.

    Thank you for years of using this plugin and thank you for being so considerate in how you are phasing it out.

  20. Excelente plugin, es momento de usar las nuevas funcionalidades de wordpress para insertar vídeos, muchas gracias por acordarte de los usuarios con el plugin de migración

  22. We currently have v1.2.0 of your Migrator plugin installed, and a lot of our Vimeo embeds stopped working. It looks like WordPress’ native handling of “private” Vimeo videos (those that have their privacy settings set to something like “Hide from Vimeo.com”) isn’t the same as VVQ’s handling was. The videos are set to be allowed to be embedded “Anywhere”, but they don’t show up on Vimeo.com. It’s a custom privacy setting that’s specific to Vimeo.

    I reactivated VVQ and deactivated that Migrator plugin, and the videos started working again.

    Any suggestions on getting these videos working properly without keeping VVQ active? Thanks.

    • Bummer, that sucks. With my migrator plugin activated, WordPress asks Vimeo for the HTML to use for embedding. I’m guessing that their API isn’t properly responding. Can you provide me with an example Vimeo URL to confirm? You can email it to me if you don’t want to post it here.

      • Sorry for taking so long to respond. I must not have set up the notifications to let me know when you replied.

        With the Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin installed, the following code works to embed the following video:

        [vimeo]https://vimeo.com/167310383[/vimeo]

        However, oEmbed does not work for that video (just pasting the URL does not cause it to be embedded), nor does it work with just the Migrator plugin installed (obviously).

        The Privacy Settings for that video are as follows:

        Who can watch this video? – Hide this video from Vimeo.com
        Where can this video be embedded? – Anywhere

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  24. Hello and thank you for this plugin, I have used it successfully for many years.

    Some time ago, I switched any videos I had embedded using the plugin shortcode to using the new core method as there were only a handful.

    However, I continued to use the plugin to assist in displaying an swf file, which I still use now. I’m guessing these types of file are not covered in the migration plugin?

  25. hi,
    I use a translator to write in English, how to do for migration, I have disabled the old plugin, install new plugin and after?
    doesn’t he have a video that shows the procedure, so everyone could understand even non-English speakers like me, thanks

        • Thanks! I made a copy of that post on my test site and the video embedded perfectly. I notice that your HTML is different from mine. It’s wrapped in a span that has the class video-container and the iframe has a title attribute too. You must have another plugin, or maybe some code in your theme, that is modifying embeds and doing a poor job at it, breaking the embed in the process. I’d temporarily disable all other plugins to see if that fixes it, and if so activate them one by one to see when it stops working again.

          • Hi Alex,
            I have been unable to successfully show the posts so far, despite the fact that i deactivated the plugins. While i was at it, my server started crashing 3 days ago after i installed Migrator plugin. Turns out, there are almost a million new entries in Postmeta table in SQL database.
            The entries are like this _oembed_time_e946c1d52428fd140bc1f153e2360f99
            and this _oembed_9fd773c93eb4e8998c63d8737b1f0e05
            There are almost a million entries like this causing my postmeta table to swell to 1.3 million entries. Whenever the database runs a query on the postmeta table, the server crashes.
            What do i do now? Can you tell me how do i get rid of these oembed entries and still keep my embedded videos intact?

            • Those entries are from WordPress itself. It’s the caches for the remote server requests that are used to get the embed HTML.

              Even without my plugin, entries like that would exist if you were to post a YouTube URL on its own line within a post. See https://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds

              Basically what happens is WordPress talks to YouTube and asks it for the embed HTML. This isn’t slow but it’s also not instantaneous so the answer is cached to the postmeta for the post that the embed lives in.

              However you should only have one entry per embed. If I had to guess (technical talk follows!), I’d say your theme is polluting the $post global variable and caching to the wrong post. This would mean you would have the cache for a single embed duplicated across multiple posts. This can happen if your theme is using the query_posts() function wrongly for example (most uses of that function are wrong). Another cause could be if you’re rendering posts say in a sidebar or something but not quite doing it right.

              Look to see if you have duplicates, for example if _oembed_time_e946c1d52428fd140bc1f153e2360f99 exists in multiple rows. Unless you have the same video embedded into multiple posts, this shouldn’t happen.

  30. Hi Alex. I had quicktime movies embedded in my wordpress template through your old plugin. They no longer work, despite using your new Migrator plugin. I still get the same error message “Video cannot be played because the file is corrupt”. I’ve tried reloading them and still get the same message. And ideas how to fix this?

  31. Previously QuickTime embeds were handled by a complicated bit of JavaScript and it required that QuickTime be installed. I don’t think it worked on a majority of Windows computers for example. That’s just the nature of trying to embed QuickTime.

    For my migrator plugin, I switched to letting WordPress handle it because it natively supports .mov files via the browser itself (no QuickTime needed). However apparently browser support isn’t perfect because I’m getting the same error in Firefox even when I directly visit a QuickTime video URL.

    Honestly, and this is going to be a pain, I would recommend sticking all of those QuickTime videos on YouTube, Vimeo, or some other type of video service, or alternatively converting them to H264/MP4 files (which most browsers can play without any plugins).

    QuickTime has been on its way out for ages and never worked well embedding in webpages, even back when QuickTime was popular. Even my old plugin wasn’t perfect as it because as I said I believe that it required that people have QuickTime installed (which most non-Mac users don’t).

      • No problem. I got to thinking though — I could probably wrap the QuickTime code from my old plugin into a separate tiny plugin of its own if you wanted. QuickTime still sucks and I recommend not using it going forward, but if converting over past posts isn’t practical, then this might be a decent compromise.

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  41. This could totally be just me, but did anyone else experience an error after the latest update to the Migrator plugin? We were unable to login to our site, we’d get a page full of errors that mentioned “cannot modify header information – headers already sent by–” and then a link to the migrator plugin. We deactivated the plugin through our ftp and everything was fine. It could be nothing to do with the Migrator and everything to do with our site, but I figured I’d ask. Thank you!

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  43. Hello I am getting this message in my dashboard, we have over 1800 posts. I’d like to know if there’s a way to track all those posts that are using the shortcode.

    Besides, the new migration plugin wordpress page says that it’s closed.

    I would appreciate any help.

    Thanks a lot!

    • @albertsauque2017

      This plugin was ended a long long time ago.

      So was the replacement plugin.

      I believe the author died last year.

      You can see the memorial below.

      You might look for some sort of find-and-replace plugin to delete all of the vipers video quick tags short codes on your site.

      I am not an admin or anyting.

      Just sharing my thoughts: I hope they are helpful.

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