John, we have little interest in helping our publishers make spammy sites with ads without countdown. I can’t imagine how annoying it is to be trapped by an ad with no controlbar and no way to know how long it will take for the ad to be over.

If you want to inflict this on your users, you’ll have to modify your CSS file. Any further help on this issue will require a pro support incident.

Hi Cat,

We’re happy to slowly track down the issue with you in case it’s related to FV Player and not the other software on your site. If you are looking for web development help figuring out what’s gone wrong with your site, please book a pro support incident. In that case, we’ll log in and track down the issue ourselves without your active participation.

Thanks.

Martin, thanks for the detailed info about caching. As we’ve discussed, I’d like to stop using these very inefficient WordPress conventions, particularly as a platform agnostic FV Player is coming.

Thanks for the report Sebastian. Our team will work through your issue tomorrow and let you know what we find by the end of the day European time tomorrow.

Martin, we really must simplify this redeployment/change process. Expecting users to resave their settings is unrealistic. My suggestion would be that FV Player keeps track of its version. If it detects a change it either auto-resaves settings itself or prompts any admin user to do so until it’s done.

Martin, I’d prefer we focused on disabling theme lightbox technology and imposing our own lightbox everywhere. If the publisher wishes to manually troubleshoot his/her own lightbox, then that’s an additional development burden for that publisher to carry. Trying to sneak in the back door by checking pages and just disabling occasionally will make lightbox conflicts complex and random. I don’t want that.

Thanks for your interest and the suggestion John. Your example is easy to use but doesn’t pass modern design standards. Our new AB loop isn’t much different but should basically work the same and look better.

You’re right – keyboard shortcuts are really the way to get precise cuts. That’s what video editors use for exact cuts: listen and then hit a key.

Hi Andrew,

Juraj is not quite right here. I’m the original plugin creator. What is correct is that we recommend EDD for Pay Per View over RCP. We did have a PPV RCP setup at one point as we really like RCP but found it was a bit counter-intuitive in the long run to manage.

FV Player still integrates with RCP for membership sites and it’s brilliant for that. We set up full membership sites as a service, including RCP licensing within the price.

We have an EDD/WooCommerce module on the drawing board for PPV but it’s not ready yet for simple download and installs. Customers are using it actively when we’ve set it up for them. PPV custom setup is $500 right now with us both installing and troubleshooting the feature on your site.

Let me know if you would like our team to set up PPV for your site.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Pranav,

AMP is a Google standard so they are very fussy about what advertising they let through. If it’s possible to add AMP to our VAST we’ll do it.

Do you have some examples for us of other VAST plugins or CMS which do work within AMP?

Hello Mllauce,

Depending on the functionality you require some of FV Player already does work as a freestanding project. As Lucia noted, more support is forthcoming.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Brilliant notes Tony. We’re not Gutenberg supporters and have a very busy dance card right now. If you find someone who could add that code to FV Clone Screen Options, we’d be happy to include it though in the main plugin. The plugin is on GitHub on our Foliovision.com account.

Let me know if you have a coder who can do this work competently so we’ll be sure to merge and release it quickly.

Thanks! Alec

Thanks for error report with screenshot Maxim. We’ll get this solved for you ASAP.

Hi Devin,

Player appearance right now is a moving target. We’re working on adding more functionality to the timeline and some options in terms of how and where the timeline appears will turn up soon (next three or four months).

We deeply appreciate your feedback and will keep it in mind while we develop the next generation interface.

Hi Artur,

Thanks for the thoughtful feature suggestions!

I could certainly imagine adding a quick rewind button. Would you be able to contribute €200 for its immediate development? This would also include mobile.

Otherwise as Martin points out, there is some keyboard support.

Cordial regards,

Alec

The way we handle it is to build custom admin sections based on templates. It works quite nicely. WordPress is really on the wrong path. Instead of building a better CMS, Mullenweg is chasing the customers around waving Tumbler clones (post types, since retired) and Medium clones (Gutenberg impossible post editing) in their faces like some Pied Piper of Stupidity and Trendiness.

I don’t think in the history of open source there’s been any leader of an important open source project who’s managed to do as much damage to the open source movement as Matt Mullenweg.

Hi David,

I really dislike the idea of selectively loading scripts. That’s a support nightmare. If a publishers chooses not to use FV Player Video Lightbox (due to their own tastes or a conflict with an out of date Fancybox js), then the publisher only needs to disable the FV Player Video Lightbox.

What I’d like to do on our end, is make it easier to handle these Fancybox issues. There’s no reason for three versions of a single library to load (and every performance reason not to do it), even if with a different prefix.

Martin and I will work on reducing the Fancybox conflicts.

Our plugin is too complicated already. We have to simplify, not make it even more complex.

Thanks though for the detailed notes. Martin will work with you on resolving this Fancybox compatibility issue.

Hi E,

No is the answer. We do not promise privacy on our public forums. Indeed these are public forums and what you post here belongs to Foliovision. We do remove identifying information where appropriate.

Feel free to choose other software and go with a closed forum type unhelpful big company who could care less about you, your website or videos. We’re an open source company who believe in making the web better and not hoarding secrets.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Alec

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hi Anonymous,

The way we create this great documentation is by helping one another and that means publishing support discussions like this one.

I firmly believe in public forums for software (almost all vendors have hidden support now – I find that very destructive and self-interested).

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Alec

Hi John,

Martin’s right. Adding shortcode to the HTML pop-ups would mostly not work (it’s in the middle of a complex structure which means HTML and CSS needs to be customised for the environment) and be an ongoing support nightmare.

If it’s a form you want to put up, you should just be able to include the form code itself.

Cheers, Alec

Hi Radimetry,

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

We’ll replace the pointing finger across the video with an arrow, that’s a great idea. We like the vertical bar with dual arrows when on the progress bar and volume as those are modified by dragging left and right. Those are the only two places that a user gets that symbol.

We’re keen to improve our skins though so we’re open to ongoing suggestions. We’ll be making some big improvements to AB roll for instance (twin thin matching timelines above and below the control bar), based on user feedback.

Cordial regards,

Alec

Hi Heinz-Hermann,

The GDPR is another in a line of too sweeping and ultimately toothless EU directives (as an extreme example if you order people “don’t breathe” or “don’t drink water” you’ll find very limited compliance).

A previous example of these directives is the cookie law. Basically all publishers just put up a notice now:

Don’t like cookies? Get off of our website.”

GDPR will be the same thing. YouTube and Facebook are covering their bases as they are the only companies large enough and who misuse this data in a substantial enough way.

Setting a local cookie (on your domain) for video playback is not a GDPR or privacy issue. Hence what we are doing at FV Player in terms of GDPR compliance (as we’ve always respected privacy and never tracked our users across the internet) is just supporting whatever YouTube is doing. I.e. our YouTube API support won’t break, however YouTube changes it.

GDPR is a mass hysteria like the Y2K mania or Bitcoin. We are not particularly susceptible to mass hysteria at Foliovision. Our values are permanent: software which works, respect for the individual, respect for privacy, respect for the independent web.

Cordial regards,

Alec

Hi Daniele,

Mid-roll ads are definitely in the roadmap. We are completing the launch of v7 core first and our database driven playlist system first.

I believe the custom pop-ups (not video ads) can already appear any time during video playback. Unfortunately our documentation does not reflect that capability. Please speak to Martin about the timed pop-ups and update the documentation and send Daniele a link.

Thanks.

Alec

Hi Redvivi,

We don’t want to add more scripts to FV Player. I am against slow plugins and slow page loads (as is Google, so you should be too).

Integrating the tabs into your theme custom web development. You should have your web developer work on integrating the tabs better into your theme (I can’t see the original demo unfortunately now). If there’s an issue with our CSS which your web developer discovers, we’d be happy to make a correction to it in core.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Hi Daniele,

It appears that you want watch percentage for each viewing. This is super-detailed tracking. Are you sure you need that much?

Can we cut back to:

1. number of times opened/started
2. last position

Going further what would be achievable would be

1. total number of times opened
2. total minutes watched
3. last position

Version two would be quite a bit more work.

Let me know.

Thanks.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Ryan,

An automated workflow of uploading, archiving and transcoding to a single clean .mp4 file which your site would serve would take us two days which normally would be $3200. As I’d like to do this project, I’m happy to give you a 25% discount, i.e. $2400.

A Vimeo implementation would be easier, just a day of coding so $1500. The plus with Vimeo is that there’s less long term maintenance and a lot more infrastructure built out into the API if you decide you want extra features later.

You can have all the control over content and advertisements you want when using Vimeo Pro. It’s just a hosting platform with files. The two downsides of Vimeo Pro:

1. you can’t really get away with illegal or heavily pornographic content. There’s no reason you would shut down right away but you’ll have to worry about at some point being flagged if someone figures out you are using Vimeo hosting and complains.
2. the DRM protection is not as extensive as Cloudfront.

But at $200/year for unlimited hosting with a working API and CDN all over the world, Vimeo Pro is a steal.

Let me know.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Ryan’s Teammate,

You wrote:

Our largest issue is it’s a website where users can publicly upload, so people are definitely not rendering it in several different codecs for the best options. So we were curious if you had any server-side solutions? And if so how much something like this could run?

I’d suggest you piggyback on Vimeo’s API and keep the videos there. It’s much simpler infrastructure than Amazon AWS. We do have some experience with Elastic Transcoder of course. We’d be delighted to create either a Vimeo Pro upload solution or an Elastic Transcoder safety net for you.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Nanowhiz,

Thanks for the suggestions and a big thank you for the information on MediaElement support for Facebook and Twitter. We’ll improve our compatibility with the built-in MediaElement management of those video formats.

I have a question for you about Facebook video – do you know that if you show videos on Facebook via API and not via iframe that the video view count does not rise? Would that matter to you?

Making the web work for you, Alec

PS. I think Vooplayer is on sale more often than you’d suspect. Not sure about the quality of the code or why one would prefer to use a player focused on its own (expensive) CDN than a player which is focused on external hosting. Their sales page is certainly impressive. Thanks for sharing that too.

Hi Clod,

Thanks for your help getting full access to PeepSo. We’ve looked carefully at the code.

Based on the current architecture of PeepSo, enabling alternative video technology would be days of work. PeepSo’s handling of content is entirely separate from WordPress.

We will ask the plugin authors to make the video display code modular or at least provide some filters for the HTML output of it.

If not, it’s just too big a job. The investment to write a bridge to PeepSo would be at least $2000.

Thanks.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Allyn,

Thanks for the suggestion and the concrete examples (they help a lot). We’ve spent some time discussing this internally. There are big changes coming to playlist (stored in a database going forward).

What we’d like to add here are:

1. a parameter allowing you to specify the start video within a particular instance (won’t change the database version but just the starting video)
2. an end of playlist action (which happens on the last video in a playlist)

These improvements should resolve your issues. For the time being, the solution is to avoid any kind of end of playlist action.

Thanks.

Alec

PS. Feel free to post any other workflow requests. I really appreciate them and we need to know about issues in the field to be able to make publishers’ lives easier.

Hi Nathan,

To step back a bit here and see the big picture (implementation of FV Player via the WordPress REST API), here’s what I’d do.

i.e. I’d have my application check for the presence of FV Player in the content first.

If no player, then I’d not add or change anything to my existing app (assuming everything is working fine for content display).

If FV Player is present, then I’d include the normal CSS files and the JS files required for FV Player.

Martin will package up the full set of dependencies in one nice package for people using the WordPress REST API.

If you come up with some clever implementations of video via WordPress REST API, let us know so we can support them better and share them with the WordPress REST API community.

I’m a big supporter of the WordPress REST API but we haven’t come up with a use case for ourselves where it’s more useful than writing plugins to the existing CMS. As WordPress becomes more and more top heavy (Customizer, Gutenberg), I can see the REST API becoming more and more attractive for WordPress front end development.

Cheers, Alec

Hi Evelina,

It turns out that Martin and I had our signals crossed here a bit. The stable release is getting all update notifications for the beta release. Which it shouldn’t do. You should have to enable beta to get beta update notifications.

We’ll fix that in the next release tomorrow so all those update notifications will stop. In any case, this WordPress insanity that every living human has to install every update in real time is exactly that – insanity and has nothing to do with the history of software. The right approach is:

1. install security updates immediately
2. upgrade feature releases on a needs basis

So you can safely ignore releases until Martin posts here that the new release/beta notification system is inside the plugin.

Thanks for your patience and thank you again for reporting the issue. You’ve helped everyone.

Amitiés, Alec

Hi Paul,

We’re thinking about upgrading/replacing the current lightbox as I’ve found that Colorbox doesn’t handle images as well as I’d like sometimes. How did you finally resolve the issue with our lightbox?

You should be able to disable our lightbox and use another. The one I liked recently and use on a personal site is ARI Fancy Lightbox, in turn based on FancyBox.

Let me know how it goes.

Hi John,

If videos are changed, the links to them would have to be changed. Adding a system for trying to track videos on a page would result in fairly fragile and high maintenance code. I.e. I don’t see it as a win for our customers or us either.

When creating internal links to teaching videos, for more flexibility it’s better to link to it as either the page or even to an anchor link. That way you can change the video as often as you like with

Of course an anchor link won’t work with a link to a specific time in the video (which if the video’s been changed would probably be wrong anyway).

We’ll definitely investigate the strange broken link.

Cordial regards,

Alec

PS. I can’t see the real estate video there (I don’t have access readily available). Could you send me a link to that video?

Hi Kobus,

We’d love to have you guys renew but FV VAST/VPAID is a service. If you’d like to use, you will have to renew.

As you know we are working on bring back as much functionality as possible to YouTube (and more than anyone else).

Cordial regards,

Alec

Hi DSwan34,.

No titles on mobile was not great – my fault as I’m not a big mobile user and didn’t realise right away there is no hover on the thumbnails. We are going to work on having multiple designs rather than a bunch of options for a single design. So there will be a version with titles again similar to the older version. End users will be able to customise the different designs.

We’re experimenting with what will be options for the designs. In my opinion, FV Player is already overbuilt with too many options in too many places, so I’m most interested right now in streamlining. We may start to move some of the more marginal/dangerous preferences into a configuration file. The idea would be to consolidate preferences on current best practices (we’re carrying a lot of legacy preferences that made sense in a pre-HTML 5 world with less capable browsers and lots of flash).

Thanks for your feedback!

Hi DSwan,

The new playlists default templates are awesome and modern. The old ones were really dowdy and old school and should have been changed a long time ago. To make sure people actually got something modern, we changed the default style.

On the other hand, our programming team should have the old playlist template available as an alternative (not default) option so that those who prefer it or have it worked into a complex design or specific interface can easily revert to it.

The next step will be to allow easy customisation of the templates. As everyone who wants to customise a template will have very specific requests and requirements, it’s best to let people set them up as they like, not just CSS but also the HTML.

Thanks for your feedback though! It allowed us to make immediate improvements to the new playlist theme and encouraged us to make at least two design themes available ASAP.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Hi Martin,

The way to improve this is not to change the new default playlist (the one where title is not visible) but to offer other playlist templates (similar to the old format with the visible name but even then hopefully somewhat visually improved).

Hi Pádraig,

Our goal here is to really improve the default design of our templates for playlists. You might want to give the new playlist look a longer trial as it really does look fresher and more modern. It does make perfect sense to me thought that one template does not fit all situations so we are 1. making other templates available 2. planning to provide documentation on how to create and customise your own templates.

Your suggestions are welcome.

Thanks!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hi Martin,

It’s a pity there’s no way to flush CDN cache. Is there? Why shouldn’t we come up with a best practices and publish it. We know as much about the issue as anyone else.

We could trick the CDN’s by making optimized bundles of js include a version number (each time it’s rebuilt the version number goes up).

Hi Ferdinand,

We’ve written up some documentation on how to use our API to program the pop-up at the end to take you to the video of your choice. Look for this section:

fv_flowplayer_popup_html – allows you to customize what’s in the popup which shows at the end of video. You can use the global $post variable to check what post is being served. Here’s a code to auto-generate a popup for each player:

The simplest solution is simply to link to the next lesson as a video action could be done using the Redirection function in our action menu. Unless you are dealing with hundreds of videos, just adding manual redirections would be quick and efficient.

Let us know how this goes. We are very interested in helping you get to a good result for your use case.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Darius,

If we forced looping outside of the loop zone that would make it impossible to watch the rest of the video without moving the AB fence posts with your mouse. I think this behaviour would be undesirable. I.e. clicking the play bar outside of the AB loop should allow normal playback to potentially set other A or B points. I’m open minded on this but would need some convincing.

Cordial regards, Alec

Thanks Sergii.

Could you tell me more about what you envision as:

Interaction support for both video and audio.

Cordial regards,

Alec

Hi Pádraig,

Thanks for the detailed notes. We are in the middle of adding a lot more customisation options for the player interface. First stop is a YouTube style interface (without the annoying ads of course!) for people who have visitors used to that interface.

Your notes are a good start to further improvements. You may be interested in a long article I published today with ideas on how to improve the WordPress Editor and the WordPress editing experience.

Much appreciated.

Alec

Hi Shez,

As you have an existing account, it’s not that easy for me to merge you to the m….m…@hotmail.com account. Ideally you’d check the m….m…@hotmail.com account for the welcome emails and use that account to log in to collect your licenses.

If you post the domains you’d like to license here, I’d be happy to add them by hand right away so you can just get started.

We’ll get started on the IP address feature next week.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Alec

PS. Martin, we’d like to merge the two accounts and resend the welcome emails to the Gmail account after making the Gmail account primary. I’d like to be able to do this myself. Let’s talk about how to handle this kind of situation in the future in an easy way.

Hi Shez,

The immediate fix with ID/IP address. The Widevine support will take us a while but it will come eventually no matter what.

Thanks!

Hi Shez,

Thanks for your initiative and forward looking ideas in this area. DRM is an area I think about often as well. There is an issue with your solution:

For the time being, I would like to be able to display the users ID and IP address in such a way that says, “this video is being viewed by ******” and then display their IP address as well and the date.

It’s simple enough to just disable this display in CSS via inspect element. Of course someone needs to have some expertise in web development or at least HTML to do so but it really only annoys paying users.

That said, I’m willing to implement exactly what you requested if you have $200 to throw at the solution.

Cordial regards, Alec

PS. The worst kind of DRM and licensing inconveniences the paying users and doesn’t stop pirates. We work really hard at Foliovision that our own licensing doesn’t get in the way of paying users (you’ll notice that the upgrade to FV Player Pro is almost completely automatic – we plan to start recording domain ahead of time so it’s fully automatic).

We’ll work towards a Widevine solution (Google and Netflix) in 2017.

Hi Luria,

Can you repost your example? I’m going to run a test of some syntax:

* list item one
* list item two

1. number list item one
2. numbered list item two

And more code in Markdown style:

Thanks Alfons for your detailed notes.

Alfons we’ll work with you on format priority until we get the fallback working just right. Mobile playback and formats are a moving target: we tune the priorities to stay up to date with best practices, along with existing browser technologies, security methods and current devices.

Hi Tony,

Here’s what the simplest solution.

1. You test our player with some existing or new posts.
2. If you are happy with FV Player, you install Search Regex and replace the existing video shortcodes with either our fvplayer format or with simple video tags (standard WordPress video format).

If you aren’t happy with FV Player, please let us know why.

We will consider adding support for jwplayer and a few other proprietary formats in the future. It’s generally better though to convert the tags with Search Regex.

Thanks!

Hi Kobus,

You’re welcome for the support.

I appreciate your issues with server performance. KeyCDN is very inexpensive with no minimums at .04¢/GB. If you turn off JetPack you may find that your sites run faster.

Trusting Automattic or Jetpack is like trusting Google: extremely naive. When you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. Your site and your users are being datamined, your business is being made dependent on a free service which can be taken away at any time.

Inexpensive services I like (Vimeo for instances). Free services I do not. Freestanding free software is the only free which is really free.

Jetpack is single handedly setting out to undermine freestanding WordPress and the independent developers who have made WordPress great. It’s not the core at WordPress which is of value (still fairly mediocre starting from spaghetti code a decade ago). It’s the always been the plugins and the plugin authors who make WordPress an ecosystem worth using.

You can’t say what I’ve said publicly about Jetpack or the moderators ban you at both WordPress.org and/or WPtavern. That’s how Jetpack manages to maintain some semblance of a positive reputation. That’s how Matt Mullenweg and Automattic roll. Hijacking the project we all helped build, suppressing dissent.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Ron,

Please don’t update the player for now. Reverting to the previous version was the right way to go when the update didn’t go as planned.

We’re really sorry about these issues. We’re doing everything we can (including stable and beta in a single plugin) to minimise the chances of any compatibility issues affecting the end user. We’ll make further improvements very soon.

Hi Martin,

There are real issues with WordPress 4.6.1 and the latest FV Player Pro. I’ve just helped TJ revert to an earlier version (which does work with WordPress 4.6.1). The issue may be in the beta code. What’s particularly tough is that once a person is in the beta stream, s/he can’t revert to normal version, even if s/he deletes the beta folder within the pro plugin (that still leavesl a fatal error if the client was already on beta).

Fatal error: Can't use function return value in write context in /home/sitename/public_html/w/wp-content/plugins/fv-player-pro/beta/fv-player-pro.class.php on line 2299

We should also have an older stable version available in My Downloads for these cases. When redownloading FV Player Pro from the free player we should turn off beta every time (the user will have to reenable beta versions manually).

Thanks for looking at this as soon as you can.

Alec