How often does it ping to save a users position?

Hello Barney,

this could happen if you have a lot of logged in users watching your videos. The video position is stored when you close the browser tab, but also periodically to ensure the position is not lost if your browser crashes or you use some older browser.

To make sure the position is stored less often you can tweak sendPositionsEvery variable in the main plugin JS file, it’s this line: https://github.com/foliovision/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/blob/master/flowplayer/fv-flowplayer.min.js#L2479 The hard coded value is 60 which equals about 15 seconds (might be more, depending on browser and media type). I would suggest you to try a value of 240 there (60 seconds).

Also, to make sure your users get the new JavaScript file and not what’s cached in their browser change the plugin version form 7.x.x to 7.x.x.1 and increment that as you make more changes at: https://github.com/foliovision/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/blob/master/flowplayer.php#L30

This way you should really see an improvement. The performance matters a lot to us, so please let us know how it goes and we will be able to make this a setting. Or we can even provide some code (a mu-plugin) which would disable all the other plugins for these Ajax calls – making them a lot faster.

Thanks,
Martin

I have the same concern, happy to see someone else writing it up.

Martin, have you guys considered SHORTINIT approach?

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=admin+ajax+shortinit

I’m not 100% sure it satisfies all requirements, but maybe?

Hello Leho,

we could be using SHORTINT, but the problem is that some of the functions would most likely be unavailable:

* is_user_logged_in() and get_current_user_id() – we would have to add some other way of identifying the user, which wouldn’t be as secure as the current approach where the WP login cookie is used and validated by WP itself. So potentially somebody could manipulate other users’ video watch times, unless we do something special to prevent it.
* update_user_meta() – we would have to use low level SQL commands instead, so if somebody would be using WP Object Cache he would be out of luck. But perhaps there is a way of clearing that for the affected users.

Thank you for that deliciousbrains.com link, it’s a great comparison of the options here. I was doing something very similar just the other day.

I think we should start by lowering the amount of these Ajax calls. If we just run them when the user is closing the browser tab or leaving the page it should be reliable enough. The current approach will save your video position even if your browser crashes, but that should be really rare anyway.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Leho,

FV Player 7.3.18.727 released today only saves the user video position when exiting the page.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Daniele,

which exact call do you mean? We did remove the periodic storing of the video position, but we didn’t remove any event when doing so.

Are the video positions not storing properly for you?

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Daniele,

adding a setting to enable that periodic video position saving would be just confusing.

We prefer to improve our plugin in general rather than add in more settings for programmers to tweak. If there is some old browser which needs this, let us know and we can enable it for that one.

Thanks,
Martin