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Hi fv team!
I’ve noticed for a while now that my videos (hosted on S3 through cloudflare) are always taking 10-15sec to display in HD. They always start in very low quality. Even when using a 100Mb/s internet connection it takes 10-15s to switch to HD?!. Is there a way to reduce that time. The first impression our customers have is really bad. Can we reverse that behavior, like forcing HD then fall on SD if speed too slow?
Another thing I’ve noticed is that even when the HD finally shows up, if I go back to the beginning of the video, I still cannot get the HD for 15s. It almost feels like the HD files are missing for every video beginning. I’ve checked on AWS and the HD files are all there.
All our videos are hosted on S3 and accessed through cloudfront. They all are in HLS, using amazon’s presets (see screenshot).
Can you help me figure out what’s going on please?
Thank you in advance!
Evélina
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Hello Evélina,
It seems that the HLS.js engine is starting the playback with the SD quality for some reason and switches to HD only after the first video segment. We are going to fix that, probably by adding an option to enforce HD playback as default on desktops. We’ll let you know when the fix is ready.
Thanks,
Eduard
Hi Evélina,
Very interesting notes. The current FV Player behaviour is basically the same as Amazon Prime video and Netflix behave when buffering. The priority is to show something which means the beginning is always in low res.
Even NFL video works the same way.
A slow start time will really worry people (that video is not working at all). We will add this option but you’ll want to be careful about it. You may get some unexpected complaints about the change.
Thanks, Alec
Hello Evélina,
we adjusted this to pick the best stream automatically. Until now it was always using the first one, but it makes more sense to let it check what streams are available and pick what is most suitable. I tested this with a mobile internet connection and I was getting the low quality stream, on fast connection I get the HD right away and there is no noticeable slowdown in video loading.
Please reinstall FV Player from http://wordpress.org/plugins/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/ and let us know how it’s going.
In FV Player 7 you will also get the quality switching menu for these HLS streams on the desktop computers (which use HLS js), so you will be able to switch to HD stream even on slow connections – you will just have to wait longer for it to load.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi there!
Thank you so much for your fast reply! I just love receiving multiple emails after posting something on your support forum: it tells me I don’t only have 1 person taking care of my issues/requests but a few people, including the “boss” and the tech boss lol. We (Martin and me from Harp-School) can’t wait to meet live you one day, and I’m sure it will happen at some point. Thank you for keeping a such top-notch plugin company at a human scale.
Martin, I will test the new player tomorrow and let you know but I already love what you are saying about it! Alec, I understand forcing HD is tricky and to use with care so I’m glad if Martin came up with a flowplayer-grade algorithm that is so smart that I don’t have to worry about settings and I’ll just know it will be super efficient :-)
Thank you, and as always: long life to foliovision!
Evélina
Hi Martin,
I just installed the player from wordpress repository and it works great!! I’m glad to see all my videos starting in HD now when having a good internet. I think this is a huge improvement for fv-player!! Thanks for jumping on it so quickly.
I’m also glad to hear the quality switch will be available for HLS in fv-player 7. I remember trying to set this up a while ago, and filling all necessary fields in settings but since it was not working I thought I was doing it wrong but now I understand it wasn’t possible for HLS yet.
It maybe sounds stupid, but you don’t know how much I enjoy having my videos in HD right after pressing play! Now we’re talking! The power of Foliovision and AWS together is the bomb :-)
Cheers!
Hello Evélina,
Thank you so much for your kind words! It’s always great to hear that someone appreciates the work we put into our plugin. We’ll definitely do everything we can to continue improving it and also make sure our users are always taken care of the best way possible.
May I ask you – would you mind leaving us a review on FV Player’s plugin page on WP.org, if you haven’t done so already? We would be very grateful!
Thanks,
Eduard
Hi Eduard,
Sorry for late reply,
Of course I already add a review on WP.org a while ago :-) (under pseudo soulshakepower).
You can put the resolve stamp!
Cheers!
Hi Evélina,
Thanks again, you are the best! :-)
Best regards,
Eduard
