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We use Vimeo Pro to serve videos for Chromecast. It has been working great until recently and no longer works at all. It seems that anything in our Vimeo account uploaded prior to September 27th works and anything after that does not. The Chromecast icon appears, but if you click it, it just gets stuck in the preloader icon and never loads on Chromecast. It looks like it tries to load but it never does. Any of the videos on the site that it was working for still work.
I am able to replicate this on the live site and staging and is being reported by any user on the site that tries to use Chromecast. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the plugin with a complete fresh install and have disabled all plugins on the site except for FVPlayer and the problem still exists. We have downloaded videos from Vimeo that are confirmed to work and then reuploaded them to the same Vimeo account with the exact same settings and they won’t work when using that new Vimeo ID. I have tried rolling back to earlier versions of FV Player with no change. I have even created a new Vimeo token and still no luck. It seems to be that videos being uploaded to Vimeo are not casting now. Is this a known issue? We have 27000 users and are getting a lot of unhappy emails and calls and would like to get this resolved. Thank you!
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Hello Jason,
Thank you for reaching out to us and for describing the issue in detail!
We have also obtained the login credentials to our mailbox. We will investigate shortly.
Making the web work for you,
Maria
Hi Maria,
Thanks for following up. I did some further troubleshooting after I sent in the email.
I have found that videos that we had added prior to September 27th to our Vimeo account work. Anything added after that won’t work with Chromecast. II can take those video IDs of any video added before 09/27and add them to a shortcode and they work with Chromecast. Anything added after that does not work.
I have downloaded videos that work from Vimeo and then reupload them and that new ID does not work even though it’s the exact same file.
I reuploaded the original source files to Vimeo as well and they won’t play with Chromecast. I have verified that all Vimeo settings are the exact same. I have even inspected all the file meta data and don’t see any difference.
I have tried disabling all plugins on the staging and did a fresh install of FV player and reconfigured it and it still didn’t work for the new videos. I tried rolling back to an earlier version of FV Player as well and it didn’t work.
I tried creating a new Vimeo app token and that didn’t change anything.
For some reason I can’t understand the Chromecast player just doesn’t want to work for new videos added to Vimeo.
Any insight you can provide would be great. Thank you very much.
Jason
Hello Jason,
We’ve ran tests and we can now see that this is a global issue. Thank you for bringing this to our attention! We’ve pinpointed the issue to around 10th of October.
It seems to be connected to a different issue we’ve already intercepted and our main programmer Martin is already working on. We’ll try to fix it ASAP and keep you posted.
Thanks,
Maria
hat is great to hear! I appreciate the fast response.
Hello Jason,
the issue is that these new videos do not have MP4 versions available.
The HLS streams do not play with standard Chromecast receiver as they use a separate video and audio stream. So we need to provide a custom Chromecast receiver.
Thanks,
Martin
Thanks Martin. Is this something we need to do on our end or is this a fix that is being implemented into FV Player?
Hello Jason,
could you please reinstall FV Player from this link? http://foliovision.com/downloads/fv-wordpress-flowplayer.zip
Then you should be able to cast these new videos.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
Thank you for sending that through. I have uinstalled and deleted all data and then reinstalled but don’t see the Chromecast icon for the new videos. I still see it for the old ones but it doesn’t appear at all for the new ones now. In the staging site I have an FVPLAYER Fix Test video that I created from scratch with one of the new Vimeo uploads and I don’t see the Chromecast icon on that video either.
If you are able to login to the staging site with the credentials I had emailed in, is there a setting I am missing? The relative url to the test video is /module-cast/fvplayer-fix-test and it uses one of the new Vimeo links. Thanks for your help.
Hello Jason,
I tried that video and it worked. I noticed that sometimes when I do a lot of testing with Chromecast the icon might not appear. So I close the browser and re-open it and the icon appears. But in this case it was there from the beginning.
Thanks,
Martin
Hey Martin,
We have had a couple of the members try that had also reported the issue and we have tried again on multiple computers and Chromecast devices. There was only one user that was able to get it to work on their Android phone. No one is able to get it to work on Chrome using Mac or Windows. We have cleared all cache and history in the browsers and tried incognito tabs as well. We have tried 2 different generations of Chromecast devices and recycled the power on each. Unfortunately no one can get that video, or any of the new ones to display the icon. The only exception was the user that was able to see it on Android. They weren’t able to see it on their laptop though.
Is there anything we can do to provide you any additional information on this? Thank you for your help.
Hello Jason,
I found the issue – some of the new videos would not cast properly as the Vimeo videos were loading a bit differently for desktop Chrome than for the Android with Chrome.
Please deactivate and delete the FV Player Pro plugin you are using, then hit “Install Pro extension” at the top of the wp-admin -> FV Player -> Settings screen.
Then switch to the Beta release using the steps from here if you are not already using it: https://foliovision.com/player/basic-setup/switching-fv-player-pro-to-beta
That will give you the FV Player Pro plugin with the fix.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Thank you very much for all of your help with this. I can report that that fixed the issue. We have had our test users all be able to cast the videos properly. I sincerely thank you for all of your attention to this and for getting to work. Have a great day!
