Hi Michael,

That’s a great idea to improve publisher experience. Thanks for the offer to support the new feature. If you pick up a Pro Support Incident, we’ll implement your improvement right away.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Francesco,

It looks like this is just SEMrush looking for unnecessary improvements. If you want to use the built-in html 5 player in the browser, you would not use a javascript player. Almost everyone does use a javascript player.

Could you give us some examples of sites with external player (mediaelement.js, jwplayer, plyr.io, etc) who are passing this test?

We are interested in following up this issue.

Cordial regards, Alec

Hi Mandy,

The adult content is no issue. I checked your site right away but somehow didn’t answer before last weekend and only ran across your post again today.

You mentioned DRM. I was able to download any video on your site using Downie, so it is not successfully protecting your videos.

We could certainly help you transform all your iframes to FV Player instances. The investment to have us move all of your BunnyNet players into FV Player would be $200.

But if you want your videos to enjoy more robust download protection, you should migrate them with Coconut.co to Digital Ocean Spaces, with encrypted HLS and signed URLs. In that case, you should start with your master quality videos (you don’t have many) and then move them over.

The most efficient path forward would be to:

1. leave the existing Bunny.net hosted videos in place, knowing that they can be downloaded. We can move them into FV Player to give you the display and markup features for which you are looking (as well as some ads features).
2. start uploading new/high quality videos via FV Coconut.

For your users, all the videos will look the same, just the videos encoded via FV Coconut as HLS encrypted with signed URLs will be very difficult to download (standard tools don’t work).

Let me know if you have any questions.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Francesco,

FV Player 8 is stable, and has been in production use for more than a year on some high traffic site. We should have had it in widespread release much earlier.

Your image size issue is a red herring. Most mobiles these days are retina (Apple) or HiDPI (Android). There is no point to having splash screens smaller than 768×432.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Hamid,

We’re still working on these issues. There’s another thread open where we talked about some custom development.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Taco,

We are working on this issue. Our senior programmer Martin reports that current behaviour works this way:

It’s a post-roll ad, so it has nowhere to skip. Clicking skip just stops the ad.

What we plan to change is that if the visitor clicks skip on the post-roll ad it will do one of two things:

1. if there’s a pop-up after the post-roll ad, the video will go directly to the pop-up
2. if there’s nothing after the post-roll ad, skip will take the viewer back to the start of the video (with splashscreen and play button), or if in a playlist, to the start of the next video (in autoplay).

If you have other suggestions, please let us know.

We are building these improvements in FV Player 8 (which is in limited release) so Martin will be in touch with you about how to upgrade to FV Player 8 (the interface is much more modern, you’ll like it).

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi alecos,

Our tests indicate that flac plays in release 17.6. What gave you the notion that flac does not play in release 17.6?

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Taco,

Please let me know if this workaround is working for you. If not, we’ll figure something else out. Your use case should work and if it doesn’t know, we’ll make sure it does.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Taco,

Thanks for reporting this issue.

We’ll investigate and fix ASAP.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Taco,

Right now you can only choose to show an ad or show a pop-up. It seems to me if you wish to show a pop-up, you should do so without showing ads, when the video is still relevant.

We might improve the actions at some point in a way which would allow both, but we have no immediate plans to make such changes.

Let us know if you’d like some custom development to make this work.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Taco,

The option for an html end screen for the video exists already. We could probably allow a pop-up as well.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Russ,

In this case it’s unlikely to be a bug in our software. It’s a conflict in what is an overloaded environment including lots and lots of plugins as well as a page builder (Beaver Builder).

Most WordPress software development teams would give bad answers or no answers (we own a lot of WordPress third-party plugins ourselves). We pride ourselves on providing affordable expert hands-on help with development issues.

No worries. Have a good summer.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Alec,

We won’t be able to test the betas. We are happy to test the final release. So great using Apple’s iOS and macOS the last seven years. Every year many new bugs and very few fixes. Trillions of dollars of shareholder value instead of software quality control.

I’m a long time Apple user which is how I know. I’ve started a move to Fedora 40 and LineageOS this summer.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi alecos.

Probably not. We’re oping that release 17.6 will include support for flac playback. If not, we’ll consider adding the flac libraries inside FV Player.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi DC,

Love your acting showreel page. That search works great!

We’re thinking hard about adding playlist search. If we did, it would just be an extra shortcode to put wherever you want on the page [fvplaylistsearch].

Making the web work for you, Alec

Direct linking interests us, and it is more or less possible.

Comments to playlists is unlikely. FV Player operates on a video embedded in a post system. I.e. the corresponding WordPress post (which can be a custom post type) does the heavy lifting in terms of permissions, access, page design, comments.

We have no plans to change that, as posts do a great job and it’s easy to create a custom post type just for video posts where every video corresponds to a post.

Hi rabvac,

Right now FV Player videos are post-independent and don’t have permalinks. This offers publishers a lot of flexibility in including multiple videos or even multiple playlists in a single post.

The best way to build permalinks to specific videos would be to rebuild your theme making each video its own page. If each video was to be on its own page, then building playlists with permalinks would be possible.

Thanks for your question.

Alec

HI Russ,

Thanks for letting us know about the issue with IAM users. We’ll be sure to update the documentation to provide some more information on how to set it up Cloudfront with an IAM user.

AWS support is astonishingly difficult to work with and their documentation is nearly non-existent (slowly improving, thank heavens). We are easy to work with and our documentation is fairly good. But there’s always room to do better and we will.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Adam,

We think the issue may be a missing SSL certificate.

If you’d like us to set up the nginx streaming server with OBS and hook it up through FV Player, we’d be happy to do it for you as a Video Encoding Support.

Otherwise, we’re also happy to answer your specific questions. You should go through the Digital Ocean RTMP setup guide and make sure you’ve done all the steps. This guide is missing the SSL part (which is important to make sure. Here’s some tips on setting up the SSL.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Seeplanet,

We’ll finish the video thumbnails payment system next week and launch with you.

Thanks for asking.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi James,

We do log failed plays. We can certainly make a list of videos with failed plays and how many failed plays took place. This would help a publisher see at once what videos are failing.

We’ll work on this next week.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Ran,

Yes, to get playback working again, you have to upgrade your Vimeo account from Plus to Pro.

The publishers who should migrate away from Vimeo urgently are those who have videos for which it is very important to block any downloads. If you don’t care much about whether users can download videos, then carry on with Vimeo. This is probably most publishers.

If piracy is a big issue for your website, you really need to migrate away from Vimeo right now. I can see your issue with over a 1000 videos and our migration pricing. If protecting your videos from privacy is important to your site, we could offer you a better package as that’s a lot of volume (the cost to us is setting up a job and then handling more videos, but at some point the scale is enough to allow us to charge less for extra videos).

Vimeo Changes

Hi Ran,

We’ve dug deep into the issue. The changes are not on your end or our end. Vimeo has put some very harsh rate-limiting in front of their servers. This means that our previous method of playback parsing in FV Player no longer works.

Vimeo does have a traditional API, with API key. Using that API key it’s very important to make the right choices when setting up the key (you have this set up properly). For everyone else, this is what those selections should look like.

In your case, what is blocking playback is the level of Vimeo account.

Free accounts have no access to Vimeo API. Fine. Unfortunately, Vimeo is blocking API access for Vimeo Plus accounts as well. To be able to use the Vimeo playback API a publisher must have a Vimeo Pro account. Here’s a graphic comparing the relevant sections.

The Pro plan is still a good deal for any publisher with even a modest amount of video content. $18/€18/CAD$24 per month for video hosting is as inexpensive as it gets.

The bigger issue is that with our previous method, security was much higher with FV Player. With these Vimeo changes, any publisher who wants high protection of their videos, Vimeo is no longer a safe option. Vimeo videos are easily downloadable with publicly available browser extensions.

If your videos are high value content that you want to protect, you should migrate them immediately to our Digital Oceans hosting setup with FV Coconut upload. This set up is freestanding and could easily be migrated to other hosting (although Digital Ocean is the best, including file hosting, CDN and signed URLs all in one place). It does require Coconut.co for encoding and upload but once the files are online there is no dependency on Coconut.co.

Let us know if you have any questions, Ran.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Alec

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Alec Kinnear. Reason: allow larger view of image

Thanks for the ideas, Christian.

This is a bit too granular for us for now.

My recommendation would be to access the data directly from the MySQL database.

Perhaps Martin could provide you with a sample query.

Thanks for using FV Player!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hi John,

Thanks for sharing your process. I’m glad our documentation helped. Hopefully someone else who wishes to automate translation will be benefit from your post.

Let us know if you come up with any improvements to the process. AWS does have a good use case after all.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Radu,

You should be able to upload your own subtitles to your Vimeo video. This is FV Player Pro only.

I’m not sure if you are a Pro user or not.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Michael,

That’s brilliant. Exactly the right way to save storage costs and keep archives simple.

Thanks for sharing! We’ll work on implementing something similar with Coconut.co (encoding costs are lower).

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Samuel,

Thanks for alerting us to the current (Portugal) and upcoming (EU) parental rating issues. The big problem is that these ratings are different in every country. We’ll have to put a framework together which will allow different countries to add different rating systems.

Where it gets complicated is if you have a Portugese site and you are delivering video to a German visitor/member. Which ratings do you show?

This is not going to be easy but we will put something together.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Magdalena,

Were you ever able to make FV Coconut work? I’m sorry Vimeo removed the possibility of securing video hosted by Vimeo.

Hi Dilan,

The solution is javascript not CSS in this case. This code should sort you out.

flowplayer( function( api, root ) {
  api.on( 'ready', function() {
    api.trigger( 'ab-loop' );
  } );
} );

Let us know if that works for you.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Beltran,

I suggest you look closely at our FV Coconut workflow.

Let me know if you have any more specific question.

Thanks, Alec

There’s enough subtitle options Martin, we are not adding more.

Hi Magdalena,

I’ve reviewed your website personally. Very inspiring. My suggestion would be to use the FV Coconut workflow to Bunny.net with HLS encrypted encoding and signed URLs. This should be sufficient security. You have so much to do with managing your psychology business, seeing your clients, maintaining your website and marketing online.

DRM is an imperfect science. It should not be given a front-row site in most businesses (there are exceptions and we have such clients).

Let me know how we can help.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi James,

Thanks for sharing your poor Vimeo experience. If you are running five streams at the same time, yes you probably have to be on a metered account. We know of worse cases where simply VOD accounts using a reasonable amount of bandwidth were cancelled, against Vimeo’s terms of service.

If you would like to code an enhancement for Cloudflare yourself, please go ahead. If you share the code with us, we’d be happy to put it into FV Player Live Streaming.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Mustafa,

I understand you need to digest quite a bit of background material on video hosting and on video protection. This is why we’ve published a large detailed section on video security.

Please review that carefully and if you have any follow-up questions we’d be happy to answer them.

If you’d like us to set secure video up for you, we offer two services. The first is a video security consultation where we will personally guide you through the secure video alternatives, help you figure out what level of security you need and the most affordable path to get there. The other is our Add Secure Video to Your Membership Site, where we will set up secure video hosting for you ourselves.

We look forward to hearing from you.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by Alec Kinnear.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Steve, we’d definitely pick up the metadata and captions where possible. Via API would make it much easier. Selecting via a selection screen should work but it will generally be easier to add videos via URL from the target site, but then pick up the metadata, captions, etc. via API.

I.e. our Vimeo implementation allows picking the videos from our backend but usually I just past the Vimeo URL into the editor.

Hi Franz,

Design matters. While I agree with you that familiarity is not important, YouTube is not a paradigm of design. I tried to read through that “influencer marketing” explanation but it’s not really focused on how these screens should look.

Martin, I’d say we should just implement the Wistia interface for these sorts of screens (but I said that a long time ago too).

Yes, links on top of the video are coming. Thanks for the reminder. Do you have some examples of the interface you like?

Hi Luis,

We have an about to be publicly released ads enhancement plugin for FV Player called Indie Video Ads which allows you to create ad groups by category and set weights (how often the ad is shown) among the ads in each group.

We would be happy to add your feature request to include custom skip times to Indie Video Ads.

Our Indie Video Ads plugin is priced at $200, with renewal at $100/year. I’d be happy to give you two years for the price of one for your feedback on improvements to Indie Video Ads.

Thanks, Alec

Hi 24filmo,

Protecting downloads is not related to whether the download button is in the menu bar or below the player.

There’s no way to protect download links to MediaFire or OneDrive (sure about MediaFire, not 100% sure about OneDrive). The way to protect download links is to require signed URLs which only grant access for a short time and from your server.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Marcel,

Thanks for the images.

We’ve looked into creating a shift pitcher and done quite a bit of technical research. Basically to make it work, we’d have to disable almost all download protection. And then it’s ultra complicated.

My suggestion for musicians who wish to adjust pitch would be to do it not in the player but in a DAC or equalizer between the player and the amplification system.

Have you seen a pitch shifter in the wild actually being used as part of a pro video site (not just a proof of concept but in actual use), Marcel?

Thanks, Alec

Hi Edward,

Thanks for highlighting this subtle issue. My inclination would be to ignore the silences completely. After a long pause like that, a new subtitle would show. If titles overlap in terms of time, again my inclination would be to auto-repair them as overlap of VTT is not really supported.

I’m a big subtitle user (as I watch videos in many foreign languages and even prefer subtitles on my English language videos). I have not seen this kind of overlap practiced in any of the videos I’ve watched with subtitles across dozens of services.

What I prefer in the case of very long subtitles is to put them all up on screen at the same time and leave them up for the entire duration of the performance, giving the viewer the opportunity to read and understand the complex subtitle and still to return to the image and back.

Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Nick,

This request got lost, I’m sorry. On reflection, I don’t think multiple qualities of download is particularly useful on the player interface. It would add a lot of clutter and mines for most video publishers to step on by making the posting interface more complex and confusing.

On the other hand, it should be possible to set up below the player as a series of links. If downloading is available, that means having clean mp4 files available, aside from the usual HLS versions.

I’m still wondering about how to implement the multiple download versions on the admin side to prevent the lists of five different qualities of mp4 videos which people had to fight before HLS streams to post a single video. What makes it worse is that you would probably lpreferike to make multiple flavours of download video specific and not site wide, hence the interface would have to be there for every video.

Martin, we might be able to do something by putting the downloads in a different tab and with a folding arrow for the alternative formats.

Thanks for the request Nick,

Alec

Hi Harold and Charles,

We much prefer the download button below the videos. Putting it into the controlbar is not part of the immediate roadmap. If there’s a lot of demand for it, we may consider it adding such a button to future versions.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Eventeshu,

Thanks for letting us know about these issues but really they are for WiseChat to fix. If WiseChat can point to specific issues with how we are handling shortcodes, we’d be happy to investigate making compatibility changes on our end.

Thanks!

Alec

PS. We are cutting back on the number of services and plugins we use on our own website as more and more of them seem to draw unreasonable attention to themselves, where the developers feel the world revolves around them. In our own coding, we strive to follow WordPress and cross-plugin compatibility guidelines very closely.

Hi John,

I agree. We’ll work on a configuration which is marginally less secure but on which AirPlay works reliably. Of course if it’s possible to maintain full security and have AirPlay work properly we’ll do that too. We have an Apple TV HD in the office for testing so there’s no reason we can’t have AirPlay working properly.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Would you be willing to give up some security for AirPlay playback? We’re an Apple enabled household these days and like when our content providers allow us to AirPlay.

Hi rhys.

Let’s see if we can add enough support to the various YouTube alternatives first to make promotion of FV Player worth your while. I’m not happy that we don’t have wider support for more sites. I despise the YouTube, Facebook, Twitter monopoly on social media and more so now that they’ve truly shown their colours, openly censoring several heads of state.

It’s up to software like FV Player to make it easier for publishers to publish independently and freely.

Hi William,

The issue we’d be facing here is whether to pull the data once and store it or to regularly update it. What we would not be doing is pulling the data, allow local editing on your website and then try to sync the data back to Vimeo (probably not possible) or to store the data locally, allow local editing and then attempt to update the data with what’s on the Vimeo server.

Would you prefer regular updates of the Vimeo description or to pull the data once and then allow local editing (no sync back to Vimeo).

Let us know more about your workflow when you get the chance.

Thanks Arnaud for the detailed notes. As we discussed, Optimum Gravatar Cache seems to be more resilient at this point.