Flowplayer

FV Player's newest update to version 6.5 brings some bug fixes, an updated MPEG-DASH library and two brand new features - video position saving and custom video fields.

Video Position Saving

This new feature is available for all users of FV Player. It will allow viewers to continue watching the video from the exact point they left it at. That doesn't require any viewer input, they can just leave the page and when they return and play the video again, it will automatically continue from the point at which they closed it. 

The best part is that this works both for users that are logged in and also for guest users. Logged in users' video position information is stored in the usermeta and guest users' position information is in a localStorage or in a browser cookie. Logged in users will therefore be able to start watching a video on desktop, and then continue on mobile. This is especially good for websites with longer videos, like movies or lessons.

Keep reading New FV Player Features: Position Saving and Custom Video Fields

There has been a bit of a radio silence on new FV Player features. The reason for this is that we are still working on the major upgrade to version 7 of the Flowplayer core. It was meant to be released around the beginning of January, but we unfortunately ran into some obstacles and core Flowplayer issues (on which we worked together with the Flowplayer team) that were preventing us from releasing this faster. 

FV Player 7 is currently in the phase of closed beta, so the public release should not take too long. In the meanwhile, we added some new features to the current version of FV Player and also fixed some bugs. 

New Playlist Style: Slider

We added a new way to show your playlists - slider is a horizontally oriented style that will show video thumbnails in a similar way as classic horizontal playlist. The main difference is that the thumbnails will be aligned only in one row and viewers can browse through them by using a slider.

Keep reading FV Player: New Settings for DRM Text, Vimeo and Playlists

Adding subtitles to your videos is always a great idea. They can let the viewers watch it without sound (which is important for the silent autoplay, that is making it's way to the new versions of iOS and Android), make it easier to understand what has been said if the audio is too noisy or lower quality, and help non-native speakers better understand the spoken word. It's also necessary for people with hearing impairment.

YouTube understands that and they encourage the content creators to add subtitles to their videos. They offer a great way to easily create transcripts, which is usually a time-consuming process, or requires a specific and expensive software. It offers two options: creating an automatic transcript and putting in your own text and have it synced automatically with the video.

Keep reading The Ups and Downs of Using YouTube's Auto-captions

Sticky Video

Sticky Video is a cool new feature that we recently added to the free version of FV Player. When active, it will create a small video box that will float when you scroll below the original video. See how it works in this video and you can also scroll down past the video to see it in action!

As you can see, the video box will appear automatically. It can be closed if the viewer wants and contains all the functions of the regular player. The mini video box will also hide when you scroll back to the original video and re-appear when scrolling down again. 

Read our Sticky Video guide to learn more about it.

Splash Text

Splash Text is a new and more appealing alternative to the classic video captions. It will let you write a text that will be shown in a stripe overlaying the video - it looks very similar to the "2017 with captions" playlist design.

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: Sticky Video, Splash Text and Updated Pay Per View

The Pro version of our FV Player recently got some interesting new features and more are on the way. 

BunnyCDN Support

FV Player Pro now has a new hosting option - BunnyCDN. This network with a funny name and a claim that says it's powered by bunnies is actually one of the cheapest storage/CDN solutions available, with the prices starting at $0.005 per GB for the global distribution. You can also select only specific regions.

BunnyCDN offers everything you would expect from this kind of service - easy-to-use storage and distribution Pull Zones setup in a user-friendly interface with the possibility of adding the signed URLs protection to your videos via authentication token.

Keep reading FV Player New Features: BunnyCDN Support and Bug Fixes

FV Player's latest version 6.3 will brings new design options for playlists and also integrated support for the Visual Composer plugin.

You don't have to be a seasoned veteran programmer to notice that controling our player is based on using shortcodes. Shortcodes are a part of the WordPress core and they are specifically designed for simplifying the use of code in the editor.

You can think of them as a set of pre-defined macros - a series of words, shortcuts and symbols, that have to be used with an appropriate syntax and will trigger a specific response. In this case it's generating an HTML or other markup. Shortcodes in WordPress are easily recognizable as they are always using the square brackets - "[]". For example, one of the default shortcodes in WordPress is [video].

FV Player's shortcode usually looks like this:

[fvplayer src="https://vimeo.com/196881410" splash="https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/609485450_1280x720.jpg?r=pad" caption="Foliovision Promo Video"]

Keep reading Get Your Hands on the Ultimate FV Player Shortcode Cheat Sheet

YouTube Subtitles Support (Pro)

Until now, the only way to add subtitles to a YouTube-hosted video was to manually upload them. This is the regular way to add subtitles to all videos - you create the subs yourself (we even have a guide on how to use YouTube to create a transcript) in VTT format and add them via the shortcode editor.

But what if the video on YouTube already has subtitles? Downloading them is pretty tricky and you have to use some kind of third-party software to do that. However, we have discovered a way to use the YouTube API to handle the subtitles through our player, so from now on, you don't have to upload anything. Just post a YouTube video as you normally would and FV Player will automatically load the subtitles, no other settings are required. Check it in this demo:

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: YouTube Subtitles and Fixed Error Reporting in Chrome

Tracking of Broken YouTube Videos

Many of our customers have websites that serve videos hosted solely on YouTube. Tracking the videos in a large number can be quite exhausting, but our player has been supporting Google Analytics event tracking for quite some time now.

Until now, however, you were only able to track the general video errors. Now we have added a specific Event Action called "YouTube video removed". This indicates that the player can't reach the video on YouTube. This may be caused by several reasons, connected to a specific error on YouTube:

• This video is private - the source video has been set as Private, thus can't be viewed publicly anymore

• This video is unavailable - usually means the video has been deleted

• The uploader has not made this video available in your country - the video has a geographical restrictions for some reason and can't be played in your current location

  Keep reading New FV Player Features: Improved Tracking and Smooth Streaming Support

FV Player just got one of the bigger updates. What does the version 6.2 bring?

• New Feature – Email Subscription Forms
• Improved Audio Layout
• Redesigned Playlists

New Feature – Email Subscription Forms

FV Player allows users to have some custom scripts as end pop-ups for quite some time, but that's not for everyone. We wanted to create a new way for the users that are not as tech savvy to make the most of their videos. The most common way to use your video views for your benefit is earning sweet profit from serving ads with them. But what else can you do with that?

You can use the videos as a marketing tool. And what is one of the most powerful and common tools of online marketing? Definitely newsletters.

That's why we decided to create a simple out-of-the-box solution for creating a subscription form at the end of the video, that will display a message you want and will be connected directly with the mailing list of your choosing.

Keep reading FV Player 6.2: MailChimp Integration, Redesigned Playlists & Audio Format

Amazon Drive is a cloud service similar to Google Drive, primarily made for storing user content and sharing it easily with others.

Until this month, Amazon Drive was offering unlimited storage for everyone for a trial period and Amazon Prime users were supposed to have it without restrictions. The current pricing will allow you to keep 5GB for free, or switch to a paid storage plan that will provide 100GB for $11.99 per year.

Still, it's a bargain compared to Amazon's S3, which isn't so expensive itself, but it can easily cost you monthly what you would pay yearly for Drive for the same amount of data, if not more.

On the other hand, S3 is designed for video hosting (among other things), so the loading of videos is much faster than Drive. If you are, however, looking for a place to cheaply store large amount of videos, you don't necessarily need speed or download protection and you don't want your videos to be rejected because of their content (for instance, YouTube won't allow you to upload adult content), Amazon Drive might be for you.

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: Amazon Drive and Improved DRM Text

FV Player's latest update (6.1.3) brings a couple of new settings that affect mobile devices, along with improved playlist subtitles and better control of how MPEG-DASH streams switch quality.

New Mobile Settings

There is a whole new section in Settings > FV Player > Setup tab called Mobile Settings.

It contains two brand new features:

Use native fullscreen on mobile

When turned on, this option will force player to load the native fullscreen on all mobile devices. This will result to losing all the FV Player's extra features like pop-ups, ads, speed buttons, AB loop or subtitles, but it will provide a faster and more stable interface for some of the devices. This option is actually turned on automatically for mobiles and tablets with older versions of OS (Android 4.4 or lower and iOS below 7).

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: Mobile Settings and Better Playlist Subtitles

Improved Keyboard Controls

Controlling FV Player on desktop can be done by mouse, but also by using a set of keyboard shortcuts. These can be used in the fullscreen or when the mouse pointer is hovering within the borders of the video box. For instance, you can use the keyboard to start and stop the video, mute it, and change the volume or speed of the playback. 

Not every user knows, however, that there are some features that are available only via the keyboard. We have improved the seeking that was available before and added a couple of new ones:

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: Improved Keyboard Controls and Transcripts

We have released a new update of the FV Player, which brings some changes that are not immediately visible because they concern mainly the backend, but that doesn't make them any less exciting!

The version number is 6.1. We based our version numbers on core Flowplayer engine for a while (that's why it was 6.0.5.x before), but there are no more Flowplayer 6 versions to be released and we don't like these long version numbers anymore.

FV Player Pro latest version remains 0.8.17. 

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: Improved Video Loading Code

Update:

Vimeo has made a new statement about the situation with deprecated TLS protocols on one of their CDN providers. A Vimeo employee, Dana Cacciatore, has stated in this forum thread:

Our CDN provider has just implemented a fix that should restore playback functionality on older browsers and applications.

Please note that this is only a temporary fix. The deprecation plan of TLS 1.0/1.1 is mandated by the PCI Security Standards Council and will force numerous providers across the internet to adjust according. Our team will be working on a communication plan that outlines specific details for users who access Vimeo on older browsers and devices.

Original post:

In the last few days, some of you may have noticed that the Vimeo-hosted videos are not playing on older Android devices - specifically the versions 4.x. and lower.

Keep reading Update: Issues With Vimeo on Older Android Devices

It's pretty easy to track the performance of your videos and ads with FV Player, since it automatically integrates with Google Analytics and creates custom events, which you can filter to get the most relevant and detailed data. You can find out which videos are viewed the most, what devices are used the most for watching, track video errors, or even create a custom email reports, so you are informed all the time. You can find more about tracking videos in this guide: Using Google Analytics with FV Player.

There was a slight problem with the labels of YouTube videos - they were marked with their URL suffix and were recognizable only by the video ID, for example "watch?v=A8o_fqHSsYI". As some of our users pointed out, this was not very convenient, so from now on, the player will label the videos with their full title, with "YouTube:" as a prefix, and the video ID as a suffix - very similar to labeling of Vimeo-hosted videos. For example: "YouTube: Tears of Steel - Blender VFX Open Movie (R6MlUcmOul8)".

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: YouTube Labels in Google Analytics and More

We spent a lot of time thinking about ways to protect one's video from being downloaded and how to integrate the solution into FV Player. Although there isn't exactly a bulletproof way to do it, there are many ways to make it harder. 

But what if you have a membership site and you actually want your users to download your videos as easily as possible? We got you covered with a new feature, that has been released in the Beta mode of FV Player Pro: video downloading is a built-in feature with no need for activation on your end, and it allows you to use a new shortcode, which creates a download link visible only to logged in users.

For example, one of our clients, an online adult website  harrietsugarcookie.com has a membership section (read more about this interesting blog in our case study), which can be accessed by paying a monthly fee. The paying members can then access video content in various qualities and download the videos directly with FV Player. The video links are protected from hotlinking with a secure token and distributed via CDN. The download link will therefore appear only to those who are logged in and it will expire after the pre-set time.

Keep reading FV Player's New Features: Download Links With Simple History Tracking