If you are looking for a quick help, skip to a desired topic on this page:
- Inserting Videos
- Using the Keyboard Shortcuts
- Sitewide FV Player Defaults
- 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.
FV Player Pro settings
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 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 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 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 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:
FV Flovplayer shortcode in the post editor
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 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:
- Disable Admin Video Checker - learn more in the guide How to Use the Built-in Video Checker
- Disable Embed Button - learn more in the guide Using the Iframe Embedding
- Disable Playlist Autoadvance - learn more in the guide How to Create Playlists
- Disable Sharing - learn more in the guide Managing Social Sharing Buttons
- Disable Video Links - learn more in the guide Creating Video Links in FV Player
FV Player options that are turned on by default
Default Video Size
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 chage 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 uder the Skin tab in FV Player settings. 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.
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 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.
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.
- 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 the Pro license you will have these additional settings boxes and 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)
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.
[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. 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 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 HLS.
Note: if you want fastest possible delivery across the globe, you might consider using a CDN. FV Player Pro works great with KeyCDN, StackPath, or CloudFront.
