FV Player adds S3 Browser and lightbox autoplay

FV Player 7.2.0.727 makes posting videos from AWS easier and also improves the video lightbox.

S3 Bucket Browser

While FV Player Shortcode Editor dialog includes a button to pick video from WordPress Media Library, most people are just copy-pasting the video links form video CDNs or services like Vimeo or YouTube.

Now you can enable Settings -> FV Player -> Hosting -> Amazon S3 Protected Content -> “Amazon S3 Browser” and the Media Library will get another tab named “Amazon S3” where you can explore all the buckets which you have configured.

Our S3 bucket browser supports CloudFront distributions too – if you are using CloudFront CDN with your S3 Bucket you will get proper file URL using your custom domain, if you have one.

It also picks matching image for the “Splash Image” field automatically. It looks for an image file with the same file name (minus the extension and quality switching prefix).

Also, the HLS TS segments are removed from the directory listings as you only need to pick the m3u8 files.

All of this greatly speeds up your work with AWS.

Lightbox Autoplay

Opening a lightbox takes one click, so why require yet another click to play the video in it? We improved that and now you only need one click to open a lightbox and play video in it:

It works on mobile too, except the YouTube videos as these use their API with iframes.

Please note that:

• you don’t have to enable autoplay for this to work
• the video won’t autoplay when you switch from one lightbox item to another

What’s coming Next

Now that the file browser technology is part of FV Player we can start adding more to it – first will be the Vimeo browser in FV Player Pro.

We also worked on adding support for Vimeo Live streams. This will be released as a separate addon, along with other improvements for live streaming.

We are finishing up the new player storage in database which will unlock many new amazing features, such as multilingual subtitles in playlist or FV Player manager interface. And many more will come later – chapters and video transcripts in playlist,  timeline actions – popup at any time in any video and so on.

Thanks to the modern HTML5 technology you will be also able to generate the video splash screen in the FV Player interface. We have a working prototype, so this is coming soon!

Martin Viceník

Martin graduated as an engineer in Computer Science from Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. He grew up in Liptovský Mikuláš in northern Slovakia next to the beautiful Tatra mountains. He is the developer behind our FV Player.