Hello dplum,

AWS lets you protect the videos agains hotlinking and some basic video downloading tools. But these days you can get browser extensions which let you download such videos.

We set the minimal expiration time to 900 seconds (15 minutes) to provide a safe minimal time to buffer the video. Recently we did some improvements on that part, so even a much shorter values could be used. With exception of iOS which just doesn’t trigger proper errors for us to catch when the link times out.

But to really protect the videos from downloading you need a proper DRM. FV Player Pro does give you encrypted HLS which is about to get a lot easier with our new plugin which will integrate the Coconut video encoding service.

Then we would like to explore the DRM provided by EzDRM service.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Roxanne,

the new AWS regions in Milan and Cape Town were added.

If you can’t wait for the new FV Player version, you can reinstall it from this ZIP file: https://github.com/foliovision/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/archive/master.zip You will have to first deactivate and delete the FV Player plugin you are currently using. No data nor settings will be lost. You can replace it using FTP too.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Joe,

I’m glad to hear that it works for you now. Please let us know if there is anything else.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Joe,

please check Settings -> FV Player-> Tools -> System Info. There should be some lines like this:

FV Player VAST version:   7.4.15.727
FV Player VAST license:   Valid (next check 2020-05-18 21:50:38 GMT)

Please let us know what you find. I think there must be some error in the license check. If you send that whole System Info to us it will be helpful too.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Nikolaos,

so your video start is set to 11:20. The video is 36:45. FV Player shows the proper duration of the remaining part – 25:25. And even the part of the video which it shows is correct.

I also tried to seek to 0:55 on your website and the video shows the 3 people in the video converence and view of the school classroom which then rotates to some cleaning wipes and so on.

So perhas I’m missing the point – do you want to just play the video from the 11:20 time, but allow your visitors to seek before that time? That’s not how our start/end feature does. We built it so that it really locks you down to the exact part of the video and nothing else.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Jacques,

it seems to me that you have progressed on resolving the issue. I tried to post your video to my test site and Video Checker reports that it’s all good. Notice that it reports a lot of details about the video, while in your case it was somehow not able to access it at all:

Mime Type: application/x-mpegURL
Compatibility: CORS headers and crossdomain.xml found
Duration: 00:21:11.02
Video:
Stream #0:1: Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 480x270 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 23.98 fps, 23.98 tbr, 90k tbn, 47.95 tbc
Stream #0:3: Video: h264 (Main), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 640x360 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 23.98 fps, 23.98 tbr, 90k tbn, 47.95 tbc
Stream #0:5: Video: h264 (Main), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 1024x576 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 23.98 fps, 23.98 tbr, 90k tbn, 47.95 tbc
Audio:
Stream #0:0: Audio: aac (LC), 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp
Stream #0:2: Audio: aac (LC), 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp
Stream #0:4: Audio: aac (LC), 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp

Even CORS and crossdomain.xml are fine. And it plays without issues.

So it seems to me all is working now. If you have a minute please let us know what was the issue you had to fix.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Seorim,

with a bit of luck we might get to this next week.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Nikolaos,

please provide a link to the page on your website where we can see the issue.

What is the exact YouTube video link you are using?

Thanks,
Martin

Hello David,

I see that you would like to have a custom made splash screen appearing in the player, perhaps with the name of the playlist and then the playlist thumbnails should each represent each video only.

We didn’t had a request like this before. Perhaps you could have a look at the Splash Text feature? https://foliovision.com/player/basic-setup/adding-title-and-splash-text#splash-text

That way you could set a single global splash screen for all the players with playlsit (but not the playlist thumbs) using CSS code and then use Splash Text to differentiate one playlist from another. Perhaps that would work for you if you would like to use a generic image.

Of course it’s something else than pulling it from Vimeo directly, but it’s something you can do even right now.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello James,

browser do what they can to avoid audible autoplay. However at leats in Google Chrome if you have interacted with the videos before, it will allow audible autoplay.

I see that when I open https://foliovision.com/player/demos/video-linking#fvp_iHoDxrz2Plc?t=1m35s I get no sound even though I use our website every day.

So we need to fix this.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Ellie,

please try to open that mp4 video link directly with your iPhone browser and see if it plays there. If not, then the issue is indeed with the video encoding and not related to FV Player.

In that case we should be able to improve our video checker to detect the encoding issue and at least let you know about it that way.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Dax,

if the mobile app uses the standard web view to render page HTML loaded from your website it will work, but you should confirm that it will also parse any JavaScript it founds in the HTML.

We had a user using WPMobile, which is an app that loads data from a special plugin which has to run on the website. There were some issues with it as it was not reporting the Android version properly and then FV Player wouldn’t realize it’s Android, but the WPMobile developer did fix that: https://foliovision.com/support/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/troubleshooting/player-load-stuck-on-three-dots#post-112383

Storing videos offline is more difficult, specially if you want to protect them from unauthorized download. I see that the EzDRM service does provide even offline DRM, but bringing all of that together would be a demanding project.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Edward,

if you updated from 7.4.21.727.beta, then you sholdn’t be seeing that issue. If you used some older version, then you saw these errors are you were not using the new code yet. So from now on it will be fine.

7.4.22.727.beta is the correct number of the latest FV Player Pro when using the Beta branch.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello David,

we could let you specify a different splash screen, but then it would only be used for the first video in the playlist generated from that showcase and it would add complexity to our code.

What’s the reason for not setting the desired image in Vimeo showcase directly? Please let us know, we are trying to make sure our products fulfilly needs of our users, but at the same time not add too much complexity.

These Vimeo showcases are updated every 15 minutes.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello dplum,

the CSS might work. Perhaps you can just set display: none on .wpfp_custom_popup and that’s it.

But to do this right you should make sure the popup is not there at all.

If you know a bit of PHP coding you can use the code from https://foliovision.com/player/advanced/api-programming -> “Here’s a code to auto-generate a popup for each player” and adjust it to remove $args[‘popup’] based on global $post.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Hoshang,

I must add that the Vimeo playback in FV Player Pro does require a working license, as we provide that as a service.

However unlike many other paid plugins you can renew the FV Player license at a reduced price, it’s only about 1/3 of normal price.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Deewin,

we were thinking about supporting some good plugin for related posts, if that list could be limited to posts with FV Player attached to it..

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Arthur,

your video file is missing extension, so then FV Player doesn’t know it’s a HTML5 compatible video and tries to load it with Flash which you don’t have installed.

You can append #.mp4 to the file URL to trick FV Player into thinking it’s a MP4 file, but it would be better to rename that video file to use the actual file extension.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello,

unfortunately it appears we were not able the receive your proper name from PayPal.

The issue might also be with the server which is hosting your videos. Are you on some budget web host? Does your host even permit hosting of video files?

If you are not sure about this and you are serious about online video, you should consider getting a proper CDN service.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Edgar,

please try to put in a some HTML form instead of FV Player. Will you be able to type into the form input fields which open in such lightbox popup?

When I was asking you to disable the mobile touch gestures I was assuming that the Essential Grid plugin might be using these. Since there is no option to disable it, perhaps it’s their default.

So is their plugin designed to show anything besides simple images which open some post when clicked?

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Deewin,

I posted that link to Github where the FV Player CSS can be seen and I said you need to override that line of CSS. That line makes the elements of the Flowplayer user interface (.fp-ui > *) invisible in the splash state with display: none, so you would have to change that in your theme CS file.

Then I posted another line which should work. If it won’t then this line from our CSS guide at https://foliovision.com/player/advanced/css-tips-and-fixes should give you a good start:

To boost the importance of the CSS rule make sure you prepend more selector classes or IDs in front of it. Just adding #content should help with most templates.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Carl,

the workaround is that you open a player for editing, which gives you the preview of the single video associated. Then you can click the “Add another video into playlist” button which gives you the playlist editing mode where you can actually enter the player/playlist name.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Deewin,

when we post these CSS tweaks, we assume that you have some knowledge of how it works. So please try to do that, as we cannot provide support for any customization out there.

At the same time we want to make sure our player covers the video publisher needs. So if you have a new mode of the controlbar operation in mind, or perhaps you are trying to mimick a popular player, we are happy to hear about your suggestions.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Carl,

you can only enter that name if you are editing a playlist.

But we already got a request to improve this – one of our users would like to keep using that field to label his player internaly, without showing that information in front-end. He ended up clicking the button to add another playlist button, that opens the playlist editing mode, where you can fill in that field, and then just saving the player.

So we will come up with some plan.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Edgar,

that Essential Grid seems to use Fancybox for the lightbox effect, just like FV Player.

But there is something handling swipe and perhaps other gestures on mobile devices and that is blocking our player from starting the playback. That’s why my recommendation is:

Please try to disable the dragging or touch destures for the lightbox and it should work.

We also have a paid service to make FV Player work with your theme: https://foliovision.com/downloads/making-player-theme Perhaps you would prefer that, although if code your own themes, we can provide more troubleshooting steps to you to figure this out.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kristin,

yes, if you decide to use BunnyCDN, that’s what you will have to do. It supports signed URLs too, here’s our guide for that: https://foliovision.com/player/video-hosting/using-bunnycdn-with-fvplayer-pro However instead of creating the Storage Zone you would have to only provide your S3 bucket URL along with the AWS access key. And I see the BunnyCDN interface has changed a bit too.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Edgar,

why did you decide not to use the FV Player lightbox function? This way it’s just more complex. Although I see that with Essential Grid you are able to load each item with Ajax.

Please try to disable the dragging or touch destures for the lightbox and it should work.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Desi,

do did that fix the issue?

If it’s still loading twice I think the issue remains, as loading jQuery the second time causes some of the hooks from the first instance to stop working.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello saruti,

unfortunately your picture didn’t make it through.

Are you saying there is no red FV Player icon above your post editor? You can see how it looks like here: https://foliovision.com/player/basic-setup/start-up-guide#insert-videos

If you are using Gutenberg, you need to use the FV Player block.

Alternatively you can post your player at wp-admin -> FV Player, then copy the shortcode from there and paste it anywhere you need it to be. Since it’s a standard WordPress feature, almost every editor does support it.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kristin,

what is the location of the S3 bucket and what is the user location? If the bucket is in one of the USA AWS datacenters and the user is in Europe or Asia, there is a bigger chance of issues like this.

Although it shouldn’t certainly go back to the first video. I’ll test that carefully now.

We had a bad week – one of the video membership websites which we worked on had a ton of similar issues with encrypted HLS streams. The CDN would fail to pull the video files from the origin server for user in Europe and Asia. We even deployed a secondary backup CDN for these visitors.

But then it turned out there was some issue with routing which was outside of reach of our CDN and VPS providers and once it got fixed, all the issues just disappeared.

What I’m saying is that if your are reaching global audience, you should by using CloudFront together with S3. It does come at a higher price though. A much cheaper option is BunnyCDN, which can pull from S3 buckets using signed URLs. It’s also easier to setup, although we don’t have a guide for such combination (AWS S3 as file storage and BunnyCDN for delivery).

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Arthur,

please check your videos without our video checker and let us know what you get: https://foliovision.com/player/basic-setup/how-to-use-video-checker

It seems to me you must simply be linking to your videos using http:// and that’s no longer working on https:// enabled websites in new Chrome and perhaps even the other browsers.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello xiaoyuhsj,

as it says in the Ad Sense Help -> Video publisher policy guide:

Publishers cannot use interactive media ads products to monetize YouTube-hosted content. For YouTube content, publishers must monetize through the YouTube Partner Program.

— https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/3522024?visit_id=637230205771023634-1481022754&rd=1

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Deewin,

I will have to check your feature request with Alec. Yesterday I could imagine this as an useful addition, but now it seems to me it will just make FV Player code more complex, while we are working on improving the workflow for HLS encoding, which makes this quality switching feature less interesting.

We could do it as a custom programming job for your website, but we would have to guareantee it will keep working, so it’s really not that easy.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kristin,

at this point it’s there to serve our upcoming FV Player Coconut plugin. With that plugin you pick your video from your Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces bucket and have it encoded, encrypted and stored in the bucket of your choice, all in single step. It also generates these timeline previews.

But we will have a look if other video encoding services could create the timeline previews in the same format.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Iggy,

we have used the Rocket.Chat without any issues.

The question about a chat plugin to provide the features which you mentioned is pretty wide, which is why Juraj never got back to you. Did you found any plugin like that and did you run into issues when using it with FV Player, or do you just wonder how to put it over the video?

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Deewin,

I see, when you enter 0 for Bottom Margin it thinks it’s empty end puts in the default value.

We have prepared a fix for this for the next FV Player release.

To get the fix right now you can reinstall FV Player from this ZIP file: https://github.com/foliovision/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/archive/master.zip To do that you will have to first deactivate and delete the FV Player plugin you are currently using. No data nor settings will be lost. You can replace it with FTP too.

Thanks,
Martin

Helllo Deewin,

I see that we could improve the quality switching to work the way you described. We already have multiple slots for different video sources, so we could make it work if each quality would match on of these quality prefixes, like -hd, -sd or -mobile. Making it totally independent would be a bigger project.

However a HLS stream is a much more robust way of streaming video and currently we are mostly working on allowing a simple workflow for video posting which will include real stream encryption.

The obsfucation of video URLs in the source code could work, it would be a handy feature. These URLs would still have to be decoded somewhere, but even if it happens in JavaScript it would make it so much harder to just parse the HTML for the video links.

What I would recommend instead of that would be to restrict the referrers on your video hosting servers. That way you can block anybody who might try to hotlink your video.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Binson,

I’m sorry that this took so long, but the fix has been prepared for the next release.

To get the fix right now you can reinstall FV Player from this ZIP file: https://github.com/foliovision/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/archive/master.zip To do that you will have to first deactivate and delete the FV Player plugin you are currently using. No data nor settings will be lost. You can replace it with FTP too.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Miles,

please check that “Mixed content” warning at the end of that video checker message. You need to link to your video using https://

I see we should be shortening that video URL in that popup and change this kind of Mixed content message from a warning to a full-blown error as it’s so important for Chrome now.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kristin,

weI have worked on fixing this – it no longer jumps to the start of the video for a second when recovering.

You can test here: https://foliovision.com/player/demos/amazon-signed-urls#fvpexpirelow Play the video for 5 seconds and then seek into unbuffered position and you will get a smoother behavior.

Although the error message still blinks for a fraction of second.

I see that “that start of video blinking for a second” issue should be improved for the Quality Switching too.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Max,

I see you are using FV Player 7.4.14.727. I was able to reproduce the issue, using Safari on iPhone with iOS 13.3.1.

When I load your page I can sometimes see errors like “The network connection has stalled” in the browser debug console, it sometimes causes even the video splash screens to not load. So perhaps your website host doesn’t like you to host large files on it and it triggers these errors.

But I was able to play the videos through without interruption, it would “only” popup that message about video stalling basically every second.

Please upgrade to FV Player 7.4.17.727, which was released yesterday. It uses a better way of detecting a video which stops loading half-way through for iOS.

Hello Kristin,

that fix will have to be in FV Player Pro, we will work on that.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Daniel,

FV Player 7.4.17.727 has been released and it includes that fix which we created.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Michel,

we have built a plugin for this, but then Vimeo has blocked 3rd party players from playing these live streams.

So the way it works is that while the stream is live it’s showing as a standard Vimeo iframe and when the stream is not live anymore and it gets archived it embed with FV Player propery: https://foliovision.com/downloads/fv-player-vimeo-live

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kristin,

we can improve that video reload to not show first few seconds of the video at the start.

We can also detect long videos and use longer video link TTL on them to prevent this issue as well.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Jp,

please install Twenty Twenty theme and preview the website with it. Your live website won’t be affected. You will just have to use the menu in that preview to navigate to some post or page with a video.

Another thing to try is to enable your browse JavaScript console (usualy Ctrl + Shift + J, or check instructions for your browser here: https://wordpress.org/support/article/using-your-browser-to-diagnose-javascript-errors/#step-3-diagnosis ) and reload the page. Then see if there are any errors on that console.

I’m not sure what could be giving you “Domain Unable To Connect” error. Is that some plugin, or does the web browse give that back?

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Enrico,

unfortunately just like that response says – the license you are using is indeed expired.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kiran,

what Juraj means is that if you don’t use Cloudfront with the S3 bucket which contains a HLS video from MediaConvert you have to make sure the files are stored with the public permissions, see steps 21 and 22 below the “File permissions” heading here: https://foliovision.com/player/securing-your-video/mediaconvert-encrypted-hls-guide

Also, the guide mentions “please be aware of the fact that every steps about download protection or privacy need to be skipped” and I can see you are using the signed URLs. But once the video files are made public it should not matter.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kristin,

thakn you for the video. It appears the video did recover once you hit that reload button. I understand that it’s far from ideal, but since iPhone won’t report any video error for an expired AWS S3 link, there is not much we can do.

What would really help would be if AWS S3 could be configured to return a HTTP 404 error for an expired link, rather than HTTP 403. That way iPhone would surely detect the issue. But I checked Cloudfront and BunnyCDN, both of which can work with S3 and they both return HTTP 403 when the signatue is expired.

—–

I have worked on fixing this – checking some of the less documented iOS Safari video events and putting together something that does:

1) reload the video path if the signature ran out of time while watching the video as it was progressing
2) relaod the video path if you seek into an unbuffered path and the signature is expired

And there is no user interaction required.

You can test that new version using iPhone on https://foliovision.com/player/demos/amazon-signed-urls#fvpexpirelow

You can also download the new plugin version with the fix here: https://github.com/foliovision/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/archive/294-ios-403-recovery.zip

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Oluwajoba,

does VideoPress used HLS format? I noticed such problem with some of the HLS streams when playing in browser like Firefox or Chrome on a desktop computer – it hs to use the HLS.js to play as these browser don’t support HLS natively and it has some minor issues like that with some of the streams.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello,

we found that email, there is a screenshot of your https://foliovision.com/my-license page where you can see the “Download FV Player Pro” button.

Also check our FV Player Pro guide here, you don’t have to download the ZIP file by hand: https://foliovision.com/player/basic-setup/installation/pro-extension

However that license is on the co…..mt@aol.com email address.

Please let us know if there are still some issues.

Thanks,
Martin