If you are looking for a quick help, skip to a desired topic on this page:
- Inserting videos
- Setting up a video defaults and custom logo
- Editing the FV Player skin
- Customizing the shortcode editor functions
- Other setting boxes
- Manual Editing
- What formats to choose
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.
Inserting videos
Here’s a simple guide to inserting videos with FV Player.
1. Click the FV Player icon as shown in the screenshot below:
2. A popup dialog box will appear. You can write the video path and dimensions (width and height) and click Insert. The resulting shortcode will be inserted into your post:
3. Alternatively, you can click Add Media button and pick a video from the Media Library:
4. Pick your video and click Insert into Post for the desired video:
5. You will be directed back to the editing of the shortcode and the video URL. 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 move your cursor over it and click the FV Player button again. The attributes will be copied into the dialog box and you will be able to edit them easily:
FV Flovplayer shortcode in the post editor
7. When you save the page and open it, you will see the video:
Setting up a video defaults and custom logo
To set up your logo (PRO player only) simply go to Settings -> FV Player Pro -> Sitewide Flowplayer Defaults.This is the place where you can adjust general settings of the player that will be used for all the videos.
Tip: If you do not understand some setting, scroll over the question mark sign to display a hint.
Here you can upload the image file of your logo and choose a position. The transparent PNG format with width below 100 pixels works well. If you do not enter any image, no logo will displayed.
You can also disable embedding and sharing in this interface, or set up default volume – for example if you want to mute your videos by default (marked in red).
Editing the FV Player skin
Player Skin is a part of FV Player settings, where you can customize the visual side of the player. As you can see in the picture below, you can change the colour of various parts of the interface along with the font type, size and other things.
There is a example video on the right side, so can see the changes immediately after clicking the Save All Changes button. Read more in the detailed guide Customizing FV Player Skin.
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 click, 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.
Other setting boxes
There are additional discreet setting boxes (closed by default, click the title to open it up). Here are the settings for the free player.
- Amazon S3 Protected Content (more in the guide Serving Private Videos with Amazon S3)
- Ads (more in the guide Pop-up Advertising Options with FV Player)
- Integrations
- Quality Switching (more in the guide Setting Up Video Quality Switching)
If you’ve purchased a pro license you will have these additional settings boxes and features:
- Pro Features
- Amazon Cloudfront (more in the guide Serving Private Videos via CloudFront)
- Vimeo (more in the guide How to Use Vimeo Plus/Pro)
- YouTube (more in the guide Using YouTube with FV Player)
Manual Editing
Type in the [fvplayer] shortcode and add the src parameter. Use the full path. You also add the splash parameter with the full path to the splash image.
[fvplayer src="http://site.com/videos/video.mp4" splash="http://site.com/videos/video.jpg" width="640" height="360"]
Additional Features
You can use several more features if you add following pieces to the shortcode:
- Autoplay for single videos:
autoplay=true - Redirect when a video stops playing:
redirect="http://example.com" - Show or hide the controlbar – enter one of these or omit for default behavior:
controlbar="yes" - visible while playing
controlbar="no" - no controls visible
- Show the splash image also when the video finishes playing:
splashend=show - Example of the popup at the end of the video:
popup="Would you like to share the video or play it once again?"
Click play or share the video at the end
What formats to choose
This topic is covered in more detail in the guide Video Encoding for HTML 5, however:
- 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 Flash version of our player – Firefox on Mac, Opera…)
-
For optimized Flash streaming add in the RTMP distribution of your video.
Other option would be to provide the video in WEBM format over HTTP (supported by Firefox and Opera) – if you can re-encode your videos.
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.
- And last – if possible, provide your video over HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) protocol in M3U8 format – best possible streaming for Apple devices and browsers. You have to hit the Add another format button to be able to add another format.
If you are a power user, you can provide as much formats as you want
Note: if you want fastest possible delivery across the globe, you might consider using some cloud service too.
