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Wouldn’t it be nice to easily be able to collect and manage your videos and video playlists in a central location? Or easily customize video player skins with a few clicks? Embedding video players and playlists can be a little tricky, especially for those who aren’t familiar with it. VP Factory is making it drop-dead simple though, even for people who want to host videos themselves.

I’ll take a look at Video Player (VP) Factory and their offerings, with a preview screencast soon to follow.

VP Factory

Overview

The idea behind Video Player (VP) Factory is it’s an easy way to manage and publish your video library with additional options such as a customizable player, different hosting options, central management console and more.

Choose Hosting

You’re able to stream videos from YouTube, your own hosting or purchase hosting from them. You can create skins for the player, change its buttons and even add a logo watermark. It’s a great idea for those who need a place to centrally manage videos and video playlists.

Just recently I started shooting video with my DSLR and ran into the dilemma of choosing a method for sharing those videos. Of course YouTube is a popular choice but my videos exceeded YouTube’s limits and I already have my own hosting. What I needed was a customizable player I could embed anywhere and an easy place to manage video playlists. I already developed a solution but I wouldn’t have had to if I had found VP Factory first.

Pricing

VP Factory offers a Free plan for those of you who don’t need it for commercial purposes and plans starting at $9 per month for commercial purposes or those who need more resources. At 10,000 player views per month for the Free plan, it seems like a pretty good option. However, sharing isn’t an option and you’ll have to find your own hosting. These days almost all web apps provide some level of hosting, even if it’s from a few hundred MB to a couple GB.

Pricing

If you need additional resources, you can purchase them incrementally. Although hosting and bandwidth is much more expensive than if you found your own elsewhere.

Additional Resources

It seems the intended purpose behind VP Factory is to provide a central location for people to manage their videos and video playlists, easily customize and skin the video player but not really host the videos with VP Factory.

User Interface and App Usage

The overall interface is well designed and very easy to use. Help is available to guide you through the app when you first login, though it’s not really necessary. Video tutorials are also available should you need them at a later time.

Guide Me

Adding Videos

Adding videos to your collection is as simple as uploading the video file from your local system, pasting the URL to a YouTube video or to a video hosted yourself (or elsewhere). You can easily create new playlists, which show up as new tabs (like the Videos tab).

Add Videos

Creating Player Skins

Creating player skins is just as straight forward as adding videos or creating playlists. You have several menu and color options, including options to change button hide time, continuous play, random play, etc.

Create Player Skins

Create Players

The last of the pages allows you to create different players with different custom skins and settings. Each player can include a different set of videos, which can easily be changed later on after the player has been embedded. This is a great feature to be able to change a player’s video playlist without ever replacing the embedded player on a site.

Create Players

Final Thoughts

I certainly like the idea of VP Factory, especially the customization features and library management. However, I do think some sort of hosting option (with VP Factory) should be included in the Free plan, as most web apps include something (even if only temporary).

The overall interface and usability of the app itself is great, though I would like to see some more customization options in the future. As VP Factory is such a new web app though, I have no doubt great new features are likely already planned and maybe even in development.

Overall I think an 8/10 is a fair rating, but with application maturing and additional pricing options and improvements to the Free plan, a 9 or higher could be achieved.

Screencast Preview

Coming soon!

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