In this guide you will find:
- What Does the Video Downloading Feature Do?
- Using the Video Downloading Shortcodes
- Setting up the Template Defaults
- Integration With Simple History
- Changing The Appearance Of Download Button
What Does the Video Downloading Feature Do?
Video Downloading is a built-in feature made for websites with membership sections that would like to allow their users to easily download video content. There is no need for activation on your end, the feature is built in the newer versions of FV Player Pro (available since version 0.8.4). This feature lets you download an MP4 video or a Vimeo video (It doesn’t allow to download YouTube video).
Video Downloading allows you to use a new shortcode, which creates a download link visible only to the users that are logged in. The download link will allow the users to easily download the video set as the source in the short code.
Using the Video Downloading Shortcodes
The Video Downloading feature can be currently used only by manually creating shortcodes. These are slightly different from the regular shortcodes: they are marked as “fvplayer_download” instead of the regular “fvplayer“. This kind of shortcode will generate a link that will instantly make a download call after clicking. The text of the link will be generated from the “caption” parameter. It does also works with playlists. For example:
[fvplayer_download id="64" caption="Click this link to download the video"]
You need to specify the id attribute from your FV Player video database and also the caption, which will determine the text of the download link.
Alternatively, you can also insert your shortcode by specifying the video link instead of the id:
[fvplayer_download src="your-hosting.com/your-video.mp4"]
The shortcodes above will give you this result:
Keep in mind that you have to be logged in to see the download link. If you are not logged in to our website, then here is how the link will look like with a custom styling class:
Video Download link with custom styling.
Setting up the Template Defaults
You can create a download link template that will contain default settings of your choosing. You can do so in the FV Player settings (Settings > FV Player Pro> Setup tab > Download (beta)).
Here you can set the defaults for every [fvplayer_download] shortcode by changing the %tags% in the link. These template settings will overwrite the individual settings in the shortcode. You can also use the bare [fvplayer_download] tag and the settings will be applied from the template automatically.
The tags that are currently available are:
- name – will set the default name of the video file that will appear when the user downloads the video. If your video file is named “video1.mp4” and you set the default name to “Cool video from MyWebsite“, the video file the user downloads will be named “Cool video from MyWebsite.mp4” (if he doesn’t rename it, of course)
- class – you can add a custom CSS class here to style the download links. You can use it for instace to create a simple button (as you can see in the example above)
- src – a default source video, that will always be downloaded
- caption – a default caption for all the [fvplayer_download] shortcodes
Changing The Appearance Of Download Button
The download button follows the button styling of your theme. You can change it by swapping the “fvplayer_download button” to any other custom CSS class.
In this example, the class is changed to match the Elementor button.
Change the original class:
<a download="%name%" class="fvplayer_download button" href="%src%">%caption%</a>
To:
<a download="%name%" class="elementor-button" href="%src%">%caption%</a>
Integration With Simple History
If you are using the popular Simple History plugin, FV Player will automatically integrate with it. This plugin logs all the events on your website and shows you the statistics. FV Player Pro will start creating a custom event for each download of a video done through the Video Downloading shortcode. In the event it will show the user’s name, IP address, which video has he downloaded and on which page he did it.
