The installation process of the FV Player video plugin is quite easy and has been covered in our Installation guide. Once the plugin is uploaded and activated, you will find a full page of settings, divided into tabs and sections. These can be found in Settings -> FV Player.
FV Player Pro settings
Inserting Videos
Here's a simple guide to inserting videos with FV Player.
1. Click the FV Player button, as shown in the screenshot below:
2. A popup dialog box will appear. You can paste in the video URL from the server where it's stored. You can also specify the dimensions (width and height). Now click Insert. The resulting shortcode will be inserted into your post.
3. If you want to post a self-hosted video, you can click the Add Media button and pick a video from the Media Library. Select the video you want, and click Insert into Post:
5. You will be directed back to the video editor. Height and width will be filled-in automatically. You can use a similar function to pick the Splash Image.
6. To edit the existing shortcode, just click anywhere on it and then click on the FV Player button. The attributes will be loaded in the shortcode editor and you will be able to edit them easily.
7. When you save the page and open it, you will see the video:
Using the Keyboard Shortcuts
You can control the FV Player with a variety of keyboard shortcuts. To use them, you will have to keep the mouse cursor within the player window. You can start by pressing the "?" key, which will show you the map of all the keys you can use.
FV Player's keyboard shortcuts
Sitewide FV Player Defaults
Logo
To set up your logo (only in FV Player Pro) simply go to Settings -> FV Player Pro -> Setup tab -> Sitewide FV Player Defaults. This is the place where you can adjust general settings of the player that will be used for all the videos.
Adding and adjusting a custom logo in FV Player Pro
Here you can upload the image file of your logo and choose a position in the drop-down list on the right. We recommend using the transparent PNG format with width below 100 pixels. If you do not enter any image, no logo will be displayed.
Disabling the Default Settings
In this part of the FV Player settings, you can disable some of the options that are turned on by default. These are:
In the Sitewide FV Player Defaults, you can also set the default player size. Just go to the option Default Video Size and fill the width and height values (in pixels). This will be the default setting for all your new videos, unless you change the player dimensions for a video individually in the shortcode editor.
Default Splash Image
As mentioned above, you can set a splash image in the shortcode editor for each video individually. There is also an option in the settings that allows you to set a default splash image for all your videos, unless you change it manually. You can find it in Sitewide FV Player Defaults under the name Splash Image. Here you can upload the image in the same way, as you would upload a logo.
Editing the FV Player Skin
Player Skin is a part of FV Player settings, where you can customize the visual side of the player. You can find it under the Skin tabin FV Player settings. As you can see in the picture below, you can change the color of various parts of the interface along with the font type, size, and other things.
There is an example video on the right side, so you can see the changes immediately after clicking the Save All Changes button. Read more in the detailed guide Customizing FV Player Skin.
FV Player skin settings
Customizing the Shortcode Editor Functions
Rather than cluttering the shortcode editor with options you don’t use to set up your player and videos, you can have only the options enabled which are relevant to your site. The less of these options you select, the simpler the user interface will be to use. Just go to the Post Interface Options in FV Player settings. More detailed information can be found in the guide Post Interface Options.
FV Player's Post Interface Options
Other Setting Boxes
There are additional setting boxes in the Setup and other tabs. Here are the settings for the free player.
You can find all the guides in our Documentation. We always announce new features on our blog and if you have any questions or problems with our player, we will be happy give you free help in our Support Forums.
Manual Editing
Type in the shortcode and add the src parameter. Use the full video URL. You can also add the splash parameter with the full path to the splash image.
Start by inserting your video in MP4 format on HTTP protocol into the first "Video" field as that covers most of the browsers (some might need to use the Flash version of our player - Firefox on Mac, Opera...)
For optimized Flash streaming add in the RTMP distribution of your video.
Another option would be to provide the video in WEBM format over HTTP (supported by Firefox and Opera) - if you can re-encode your videos. You can use the +Add another format button to use multiple video formats or video qualities.
Any of these is a great addition as Flash is capable of random seeking (skipping to part of the video which is not yet buffered) only when using RTMP.
FV Player supports the two most used streaming protocols: HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) and MPEG-DASH. Use the HLS protocol in M3U8 format, and MPEG-DASH in MPD. Check the guide Using HLS With FV Player if you want to find out more about HLS.
Note: if you want the fastest possible delivery across the globe, you might consider using a CDN. FV Player Pro works great with KeyCDN, StackPath, or CloudFront.