Every now and then a user asks a question about how to customize the appearance of the FV Player on their website. Modifying the scheme and the font can be done very easily in the Skin settings (here’s a guide on how to do that – Customizing FV Player Skin), but there is a lot of other things you can set up outside the Settings screen just by applying some basic CSS knowledge.
To add CSS tweaks, use FV Player’s Custom CSS field. You access it by going to Settings -> FV Player -> Skin:
Custom CSS can also be added to your theme’s stylesheet in WordPress admin.
You might find that the rule does not work. To boost the importance of the CSS rule, make sure you prepend more selector classes or IDs in front of it. Just adding #content should help with most templates.
If the new CSS rule really doesn’t work, you can try to append !important to it to verify if it can work. That way something like:
.flowplayer .fp-captions p {
font-size: 24px;
}
Becomes:
.flowplayer .fp-captions p {
font-size: 24px !important;
}
So !important gets added before the ; symbol on the row which you want to give priority to.
This article lists just a few of the infinite amount of things you can do with CSS. These tips were requested by our users and are now available in one list, so that everyone can benefit from them:
Here’s a quick guide on creating a custom frame from an image and have the FV Player placed inside it.
You will need an image that will serve as the frame in the background, preferably in .png format. To make the player fit, you have to set the size of the video in accordance with the background image. To set the size and other features of the image, you will need to wrap the video in a <div> tag with custom id. The id will be styled in CSS and will contain the background image itself, size, and padding. The padding needs to be set individually for every theme, so you’ll have to give it a couple of tries to make it fit perfectly.
The size of the background image is 608×395 px and the video is 573×324 px, which is the size of the screen of the TV frame. Here is the selector used in this example:
Note: Please keep in mind that this solution is not responsive and won’t work properly on mobile devices.
Fixing Right-to-Left Player Controls
If you are using an RTL (Right-to-Left) language on your website (for instance Arabic, Syriac or Hebrew), it is possible that FV Player’s settings get switched horizontally and will look like this:
This might be caused by a declaration like this in your CSS:
body {
direction: rtl;
}
If you want to revert that, simply add the following CSS rule to your theme’s stylesheet (or a custom CSS file or field):
The icon size is controlled using width and height properties. transform: scale(0.8); and transform: scale(1); set the animation when resuming the video.
Changing the Play Icon Color
If you like the play/pause icons and only need to change the color, where’s how it’s done:
When clicking play, the play icon appears for a brief moment to signify the beginning of playback. The same thing happens with the pause icon when the video is paused. When a video is loading, the loading animation appears. You can make your video playback visually cleaner and seamless by hiding these icons. Here’s how:
Normally the play icon goes away once you click to play the video and only shows for a fraction of second with animation when you paused the video and then resume it. Here’s how you can make sure it shows when the video is paused:
If you want to change splash text size apply following CSS code:
.fv-fp-splash-text {
font-size: 18px;
}
Removing gradient from top of the player
If you want to remove gradient from top of the player use this code:
.flowplayer .fp-header {
background-size: 0 0;
}
Scale video to always fill player area
If you want to scale and crop your video to always fully fill the player window please use the following code:
.flowplayer .fp-engine {
object-fit: cover;
}
Hide video names/titles
Useful if you like to name your videos in the editor, but want to hide that information in front-end. It removed the title below the player and also from playlist thumbnails.
Clicking anywhere in the video will pause the playback, then clicking again will resume the playback. We can disable clicks to the main player UI element and the video and then restore it for the UI elements to avoid this behavior.
When a new viewer first accesses your website, a “Click to unmute” notice will appear on all videos that are set to autoplay. Due to browser restrictions, autoplay has to begin muted. This notice serves as a visible reminder, that the video is muted.
If you have videos that you wish would remain muted, that do have audio tracks with no sound, or you just don’t like the notice, you can easily hide it with this CSS fix:
You can also change the color of the notice and the over size:
.flowplayer .fp-message-muted {
/* Background color */
background-color: rgba(255,255,255,.5);
/* Text color */
color: black;
/* Text and icon size */
font-size: 1.5em;
}
Avoid black bars on sides of video on mobile in fullscreen
If you videos are 16:9 you will get black bars when viewing on a 19:9 mobile in fullscreen. This tweak ensures the video always covers the entire display on wide mobile devices:
The Embed button can be disabled, but then the <iframe> code stops working. So you can just hide the Embed button using CSS:
.flowplayer .embed-code-toggle {
display: none;
}
Control Bar
Make controls bigger
The control bar font is set to 14 pixels for desktop and 12.6 pixels for mobile. That affects the overal control bar height and the size of the buttons too.
You might want to do away with the whole controlbar to achieve a clear player with no controls.
Hiding the controlbar depends on the player skin you are using. For example, if you are using the Custom skin, the fix would look like this:
.flowplayer.skin-custom .fp-controls, .flowplayer.skin-custom .fv-player-buttons a:active, .fv-player-buttons a {
display:none
}
Do not forget to change the name of the skin accordingly.
Make the controlbar visible at all times
Normally the control bar disappears after couple of seconds of inactivity. There is the “Controlbar Always Visible setting, but that moves the controlbar below the video to make sure it doesn’t cover any part of it.
If you want to show the controlbar over the video at all times, here’s the code:
Ensure control bar doesn’t cover video in fullscreen
Normally the video size is adjusted to cover the entire screen when playing in fullscreen mode. The code below adds a bit of space at the bottom to ensure the controlbar can appear. Use together with the “Controlbar Always Visible” setting.
The subtitles in FV Player can be customized in Settings > FV Player > Skin tab > Subtitles. You can change the font face, size and color of the background along with the background opacity. You can read more about it in this guide – Customizing FV Player Skin.
In case you would like to edit the subtitles beyond the options available in the player’s settings, you can use these CSS selectors.
To change subtitle position, width and text alignment, use:
.flowplayer .fp-player .fp-captions
To change subtitle color, text size and padding, use:
The size of the subtitles in fullscreen mode is already increased to 125% for better readability, yet some users might want to increase it even further. It that case you can use this CSS code to set the size yourself. Just change the font-size value:
.flowplayer.is-fullscreen .fp-captions p {
font-size: 250%;
}
You can see the result when you open this demo in fullscreen:
If you want to make your subtitles field more narrow you can use this code:
.flowplayer .fp-captions p {
max-width: 75%;
}
Moving Subtitles Under the Video
If you are, for some reason, unsatisfied with the default position of the subtitles (in the bottom part of the video), then you can use this code to place them in a different position – under the video box.
The subtitles will be shown in a black box below the video, that will appear only when the text is loaded, so it doesn’t disrupt the design of your website. However, they will be shown in their default position when in the full-screen mode. There is one thing to remember – the code below works only if you use default text-size for subtitles, which is 16px. If you change it in your player setting, you also have to adjust the .flowplayer .fp-subtitle “bottom” property to one that will match the subtitles under your player. The sizing also depends on what is the line-height of your theme, so even if you use the default size, there might be a gap between the video and the subtitles below. Please adjust it as mentioned above with the bottom property.
You can see the adjusted caption size in the example below:
There is also the playlist button which shows when in fullscreen which can be also hidden:
.flowplayer .fv-fp-list {
display: none;
}
Hiding the prev/next item buttons in overlay of the Prev/Next playlist style
Some users want to show a playlist without any controls or playlist item thumbnails. The Prev/Next playlist style is close to that, but it still has prev/next buttons showing on mouse hover. Here is the CSS to hide it:
While the slow pulsing of the Now Playing playlist box is normal, we’ve heard that some people find it distracting. If you’d like to disable it, just use the following CSS code. This will also display the Now Playing playlist box in red.
The above rule is set to work only if your content column is big enough to fit a big FV Player (.flowplayer:not(.is-small)). Otherwise these thumbnails will be too small.
Lightbox
FV Player uses fancyBox 3, so most of the CSS tweaks for it should work.
Hiding Lightbox Prev/Next
These arrows normally allow you to go from one lightboxed video to another.
.fancybox-navigation {
display: none;
}
Transparent Video Lightbox Area
This code will allow you to make the edges of the video transparent, when the video lightbox is active. You can see how it works in the example videos below.
If you want to remove captions from lightbox we have an easy solution. We are using the fancyBox library, so you can just hide what you need using its CSS selectors. The CSS rule to hide fancyBox item captions is:
.fancybox-caption { display: none}
Sticky Video
Adding controls to sticky player
If you’re using sticky mode for your videos, you might have noticed some of the controls in the controlbar of this player missing. Given the small size of sticky player, we like to keep it simple. However, if you need to bring back the buttons to the player, it is super easy.
Sticky is a child element of the main player. Everything that works in the main player, can be easily added to the sticky player via CSS!
For example, here’s the CSS to show the playlist items menu on a sticky player:
You might want to adjust the position in which sticky videos get displayed. The following code puts it to the bottom right corner, aligned with the side bar.
Normally the popups have some margin at the bottom to make sure the player controlbar stays visible and also some spacing at the top to leave the share bar visible.
You can use this code to make sure the popup covers the entire video:
Then you can follow the instructions above to make the overall popup color transparent too: Using transparent background
Interactive Transcript
Allowing Hyphens for Transcript
Normally the words in transcript text do not break. With this tweak hyphens will be added to break long words at the end of lines – depending on the transcript box size.
.fv_fp_transcript {
hyphens: auto;
}
Moving the Interactive Transcript to Different Position
Interactive Transcript is one of the great features you will get with the Pro version of FV Player. It will use a VTT file to show a dynamic text transcript in a box below the video. The text will follow the video playback and highlight the current line. It will also allow viewers to skip to any point in the video by clicking on other lines in the transcript.
If your theme is wide enough (think no sidebars and 1200px width), it is possible to move the transcripts to the side of the video box. You will have to do these 3 steps:
1. Wrap the video shortcode with a DIV that uses a clearing class. Typically, all themes include a class called .clear or .clearfix. These are used whenever you want to wrap columns or floated elements so they don’t just hang around wherever they (or the browser) want.
2. Move the transcript to the side – now that we have it all wrapped, we can start moving, the video to the left and transcript to the right. You get best results if the width of your videos is set to 640px.
After this addition to your theme’s stylesheet, it should look like this:
Video and transcript side by side
3. Bring it back for mobiles – transcript on the side will really work best only on desktops and large screens. For smaller devices we need to add some media queries, to bring them back under the video. You can either just copy this part of the code somewhere near the end of your stylesheet or incorporate it into your existing media queries, if you know HTML well enough.
@media only screen and (max-width: 64em) {
.flowplayer, .fv_fp_transcript_wrapper { float: none; width: 100%; }
}
Chapters
Editing .VTT chapters titles
You can adjust the titles of .VTT chapters via CSS. Here’s how:
The free version of FV Player allows users to set the overlay ads – the classic banner pop-ups that appear during the video playback. These can be created from scratch, showing just a link or a custom call-to-action button, or you can use ad code from services such as Google AdSense. You can read more about the overlay ads in the guide Overlay Ads in FV Player.
Some of our users have expressed the need for customizing the closing button, that appears in the top-right corner of all overlay ads. That can be easily done via CSS and there are a couple of properties, that can be changed. This is the selector used for editing the close ad button:
The width and height properties define the size of the clickable field and the background-size defines the size of the “x” icon itself – therefore they should be the same size.
If you want to replace the icon with your own, you can use the background: url property (don’t forget to also add the no-repeat; property). With custom dimensions and background image, the close button can look for instance like this:
Customized Close Ad Button
Making the player left-aligned by default with text appearing below it
Although we have a post in our demo section dedicated to player positioning and alignment, some users also wanted a quick CSS reference on how to align our player to the left with no text wrapping around it.
.flowplayer {
margin: 0 0 2.8em;
}
Video Ads
The custom video ads feature available for the FV Player Pro users comes with a text that informs the viewer about the time that remains until the ad can be skipped. The time can be set manually in the player’s settings and after the countdown finishes, the Skip button will appear and let the viewers skip the ad.
Some of our users were asking about how to modify this text, so here are some possibilities.
CHANGING THE SKIP BUTTON COLOR
If you want to modify the color of the text, you can do so by adding this CSS code to your template’s style sheet:
The button uses .button class to give it the button styling provided by your theme. For the Easy Digital Downloads version of FV Player Pay Per View you need to use this CSS to target the Watch button precisely and adjust the properties as needed:
Normally the buy buttons appear on top of the preview video once it ends or when it’s paused, but also below the video (see Pay Per View demo page). You can hide these using:
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