Flowplayer

As some of you probably already noticed, FV Player is again richer with some exciting new features. We have a new hosting option - KeyCDN, you can choose a new Skin for your player, and we added a way of sharing your videos directly to Facebook.

New options in Skin settings

You will like this change especially if you show subtitles in your videos. If you go to Settings > FV Player > Skin tab, you will find two new menus: Playlist and Subtitles. As you can see, you can now adjust the colours of your playlists, but a lot more can be done about the subtitles. You can set the change the font and it's size, lower the opacity and change the colour. The best thing is that you will see all your tweaks in a live preview.

The live preview is also available in the main demo video. Previously you had to update the settings by saving all the changes to see how your newly adjusted skin will look like. Now you can just play the video, change what you want and see how it will look like instantly in the video box. More info on how to customize your skin can be found in this guide - Customizing FV Player Skin.

Keep reading New Skin Settings, KeyCDN Support and Facebook Sharing in FV Player

ExoClick is one of the largest and fastest growing online advertising networks. Based in sunny Barcelona, ExoClick provides ads for 2.4% of the web, making it the 4th largest for websites in the world (according to W3Techs). Our clients have asked for an easy way of using ExoClick with WordPress, so we have delivered a smooth, Flowplayer based solution. From now on, all the owners of the Pro license can use ads from this network in their videos. 

ExoClick offers advertisers and publishers over 20 ad formats and detailed statistical data with several options to customize the tracking of their performance. Creating a Publisher profile (the one you need to serve ads with your videos) is free and you don't have to fill in any payment data until the point when you want to be paid.

Keep reading ExoClick Ads Now Supported by FV Player

We always listen to our users when it comes to improving our player. Many great features now available to everyone were made that way. However, adding a new feature as fast as possible has it's downside - it might not be stable. Therefore, a few months back we allowed FV Player Pro users to switch to Beta version, which gave them the option to use the stable release, while allowing the early adopters to get their hands on some exciting new technology.

In the recent few months we have implemented a couple of amazing features to our player, but they were only available in the Beta mode. Until now! After a lots of testing, the FV Player Pro 0.8 update will incorporate all of the features into the core Release version for everyone to enjoy. Below is the list of the awesome new features you can look forward to!

Keep reading FV Player Pro's Update: All Beta Features Now Available for Everyone

Many of our clients ask us: "How can I protect my videos from people downloading or stealing them?" The answer is unfortunately very short: you can't. No matter how strong of an encryption you use for streaming, or how many other layers of protection you use, if anyone can play your videos, your videos can be stolen. In most cases, users can just download them. Google's Widevine DRM was a breakthrough in this area and is widely used, most famously by Netflix. Widevine works in recent Chrome, Opera and Firefox.

But just stopping people from downloading your videos isn't enough. A user can just record and recompress your vide, a.k.a. screen capture or screen recording.. It's a bit more work, but modern tools and powerful computers make video encoding and re-encoding easier. The free ffmpeg libraries are available to all open source projects. Or, you can just use a screen capturing software. 

But there are ways to protect my videos from screen capturing, aren't they?

Keep reading Stealing videos: can publishers stop video download theft? Honestly no. But neither can Netflix nor Google.

The shortcode editor has recently gone through a major update and looks and feels very differently (hopefully in the positive way). This change however means one big downside - large amount of screenshots in our documentation is outdated, so we began the painful process of updating all the old screenshots, so the guides will actually guide, not confuse.

This downside has a silver lining - it means we'll dig more deeply through the existing guides and fix anything that needs to be fixed and rewrite anything that might be confusing. That said, you may notice some changes in the next weeks. Some of the recently updated guides are:

Keep reading Updating the Documentation and Looking Forward to 2017

The year 2016 is slowly moving to it's end. Although it wasn't a good year for everyone, we were working really hard here at Foliovision for the whole twelve months to constantly improve our FV Player. This is the last batch of new features this year (and there were a lot of them, just check the blog), so read on and enjoy. 

Vimeo MPEG-DASH

All the people who use the combination of Vimeo hosting with FV Player Pro will now have access to using the MPEG-DASH streams! We wrote more about the streaming protocol on our blog a couple of weeks ago. The bottom line is that it's a video streaming protocol with adaptive bitrate, very much like HLS, and it's supported on wide range of platforms. Here is an example:

Keep reading New Features: Vimeo MPEG-DASH Support and More

FV Player's shortcode editor just got a fresh new haircut - an updated user interface! The new horizontal look is cleaner, more easy to use and takes and removes the need to scroll down through all the active functions. You can find everything sorted into handy tabs, similar to those you know from the plugin's settings.

Having a new and more tidy interface is not the only upgrade that we made. The best part is the live video preview. Whether it's changing the dimensions of your video, activating features or anything else you can do in the shortcide editor will be immediately generated into the live preview of your video. That is located on the left side of the editor, giving you the instant feedback of how your video will look.

Keep reading Introducing FV Player's New Shortcode Editor

The 6.0.5.11 update of FV Player brings a fresh new feature - Profile Videos. It allows the members of your website to add Vimeo and YouTube videos to their profiles/user bios by automatically integrating with WP Bio.

The owners of the FV Player Pro license will benefit from this the most, since all the videos from Vimeo and YouTube will be integrated to FV Player, as you can see in the image below. The free version will get you only simple iframe embeds.

Keep reading FV Player's New Feature: Profile Videos

We have released the new version of FV Player - 6.0.5.9. Although it had some initial problems, they are now all resolved with the update 6.0.5.9.3 and you can dive right into the new features.

MPEG-DASH Support

MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adoptive Streaming over HTTP) is a technology similar to Apple's HLS, that allows streaming of data with adaptive bitrate. The principle is the same - the video file is broken to a small fragments of data, that are served one by one to create smooth playback. Each one has various qualities that switch automatically to deliver best quality possible in the given network situation.

Keep reading New FV Player Update: MPEG-DASH and Other Features

FV Player just got a great new feature - Interactive Video Transcript. In short, it creates a text from a VTT subtitle file and shows it in a box under the video. But that's not what makes this feature so great. The real advantage is the interactivity.

Keep reading FV Player's New Feature: Interactive Video Transcript

A new version of FV Player has been released! Version 6.0.5.8 brings improved support for iOS 10, which allows you take advantage of Apple's new inline playback support. This basically means that fullscreen mode is no longer forced on iPhones and iPods that run on iOS 10 and above.

Now the users, that browse your pages on iPhones and iPods, can play videos in a block of text without having to use fullscreen view and they will thus be able to use all the FV Player's functions. This also improves the user experience from watching playlists, as they can switch between videos more fluently.

Keep reading New FV Player Update Brings Improved iOS 10 Support

There have been some changes in our FV Player lately and a couple of popular features have been updated.

Changes in Settings interface

Everything in WordPress starts in settings and FV Player offers a great number of things that can be customized. All of the settings however were cluttered on single long page. Therefore, we've decided to make the player's settings menu more clear and user friendly by adding tabs, that group similar settings boxes. Now you don't have to scroll down, search for, or look things up in a drop-down list. Just switch the tab and set up what you need.

Keep reading Three Updated Features in FV Player

When the community needs a new function, we like to deliver as fast as we can. That means the new features are not always stable in the beginning and might contain some bugs. As with every software product, the new and experimental features that are working but are not yet without flaws, are released under the label Beta, so everybody knows that they should be prepared for the possibility of issues.

This gives the people who want to use the new features the option to do so the very second they are available. But what about the users that don't need it and want to use the plugin as stable and bug-less as possible?

Keep reading Switching FV Player Pro to Beta

Great news for everybody who's using the free version of the FV Player! The video lightbox function, which until this point was exclusive for the owners of the Pro licence, has been moved to the free version and from now on it is available for everyone.

Lightbox is a popular function that opens images in an overlay window, bringing the content to the centre of the view and dimming the rest of the page. You don't have to create separate galleries, or have your audience open the content in new tabs. It's a very simple solution that doesn't slow page loads or clutter the code.

Keep reading Lightbox Now for Everyone!

We work hard every day to bring the FV Player closer to perfection and here are the newest improvements. The player supports YouTube playlist integration, allows you to set the delay of pop-up ads and the VAST plugin has now improved tracking in Google Analytics.

Importing playlists from YouTube

Importing a video from YouTube to FV Player is a matter of two clicks and now the same goes for YouTube playlists. All you need to do is copy the link of a playlist and paste it into the shortcode editor, same way as you would do with a single video. The player will do the rest. You can even choose which type of playlist will be displayed.  Read more about it in this handy guide: Using YouTube with FV Player

Keep reading YouTube Playlist Integration and Other New Features

The newest version of FV Player, number 6.0.4.14, is out and has a handful of great new features. One of them is the improved iframe embedding. Until now, the embedding button in Flowplayer generated a terribly long script that contained all the necessary information, but was plain useless for various reasons. The downsides are simple, the script is too hard to handle for normal users not to mention that many sites, for example WordPress.com, won't even allow posting JavaScript for security reasons.

From now on, when your audience wants to embed one of your videos, it will be done through an enhanced iframe tag, which is easily handled on every platform. The improved iframe embedding supports ads and playlists, but is also capable of embedding a video that is originally hosted on YouTube or Vimeo. The embedded video will contain it's original responsive properties along with sharing options on social media.

Keep reading Improved Iframe Embedding