We always listen to our users when it comes to improving our player. Many great features now available to everyone were made that way. However, adding a new feature as fast as possible has it’s downside – it might not be stable. Therefore, a few months back we allowed FV Player Pro users to switch to Beta version, which gave them the option to use the stable release, while allowing the early adopters to get their hands on some exciting new technology.
In the recent few months we have implemented a couple of amazing features to our player, but they were only available in the Beta mode. Until now! After a lots of testing, the FV Player Pro 0.8 update will incorporate all of the features into the core Release version for everyone to enjoy. Below is the list of the awesome new features you can look forward to!
New Welcome Screen
After updating to 0.8 and going to settings, you will see a new Welcome screen. This will appear only once, after you update the player and go to it’s settings. As you can see in the picture below, you will be able to read a few lines about what’s new in this version and you can see some of our latest blog posts. You can also see an excerpt of our changelog, so you can check the list of all the latest features and fixes.
Encrypted HLS support
Encrypted HLS is one of the most secure ways to serve video. The stream is broken to chunks of data that are unavailable without unique HLS AES encryption key. The only downside is compatibility issues (HLS was primarily made for Apple devices), but those can be resolved by adding Flash fallback and HLS.js to make it compatible with desktop browsers. Our player supports encrypted HLS hosted on AWS. Check our guide How to setup encrypted HLS stream with Amazon Elastic Transcoder to learn how to set up the encrypted stream and Using HLS With FV Player to see how enable the Flash fallback and HLS.js.
Video transcript
This is a great feature for sites that have videos with a lot of spoken word. It creates an interactive transcript below the video box, that will not only allow users to see the whole transcript, but also dynamically highlights the currently spoken text and allows users to browse the video by clicking on the line they want to skip to. More about this amazing feature can be found in this guide – Interactive Video Transcript. Or try it out in the example:
Vimeo MPEG-DASH support
MPEG-DASH is a similar technology to HLS – it breaks the video into a small chunks of data and puts them together when the video is played. Each chunk can dynamically adjust quality based on the current bandwidth. What’s more, MPEG-DASH has the highest ambitions: becoming THE standard for video streaming. More about this technology can be found in this post.
Vimeo has implemented this technology some time ago and FV Player Pro will now allow you to serve MPEG-DASH stream from Vimeo with fallback to regular MP4s manual/automatic quality switching. All you have to do is to enable it in the FV Player Pro settings.
Vimeo and YouTube splash screens
You don’t have to manually add splash screens and captions to your Vimeo and YouTube videos anymore. FV Player Pro will automatically parse them from the video host! Of course, you can always manually set any splash screen/caption you want. If you for some reason don’t want the player to do this, you can use the “Disable video titles” checkbox to prevent the auto filling. All it takes is to paste the video link into the shortcode editor and save the edited page/post. In the end, you will get a shortcode like this one:
[fvplayer src="https://vimeo.com/197701695" splash="https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/610489553_1280x536.jpg?r=pad" caption="High Above Peru"]
Bug fixes
- YouTube mobile fixes – loading of YouTube videos on mobile devices has been improved
- Quality Switching – some users, who set quality switching sometimes didn’t have all their videos in every quality version they set and the playback tended to fail whenever the viewer switched to a version that was not available for the given video. Not anymore.
Don’t forget:
- You can check our Changelog to see the full list of FV Player’s new fixes, features and changes. Roadmap available on Trello.
- You can install our plugins via WordPress
- You can buy our license and become a Pro user! You will get instant access to features like advanced Vimeo, YouTube and CloudFront integration, custom video ads and branding, and many other options
- More resources, how-tos and guides are available in our Documentation
- Free support is always available on our FV Player forums
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