Hi Marcel,

The additional details are very helpful.

Could you put together a mockup of how you would like to look and/or show me an example of a player which has this functionality done right?

Thanks, Alec

Hi Cédric and Marcel,

Thanks for your suggestion. For the moment this feature request is beyond the scope of FV Player. The biggest issue is where to put the interface.

By trying to serve every need, we would serve no needs.

If you can show us some use case examples along with good interface for the request, I have an open mind.

Thanks, Alec

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

Hi Hung,

We could support public videos on VK.com without too much trouble. To support private videos, we’d have to build something out using the PHP SDK and we don’t have anything planned.

If you’d like us to support public videos on VK.com right now, please grab a pro support incident and we’ll prioritise it for next week. For private videos via SDK, it would be custom development with an investment of about $800.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hi Glenn,

I hope your site is coming along well.

We are building a simple checkbox: “Do not show ads to logged in users.” into FV VAST next week.

If you wish to restrict ads to some membership roles and not to others, that would be custom development, which we could do.

Thanks, Alec

Answer from John

Hi Alec,

I think that would be fine. The Airplay from a Mac would be a great feature to have work with all of the new Macs that are coming out. I think more and more people are going to use this feature and there may be more Mac users in the future. I’ve started using them as well and they’re great.

John

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

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.

While FV Coconut is good already (much easier to use than AWS), there’s big improvements coming to FV Coconut, including one step drag and drop directly from your website.

If you’d like our team to personally troubleshoot your AWS S3 setup, we offer that services (as AWS certainly does not).

Hi Christian,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It seems that you are on the right track having Cookie Consent not show YouTube links

FV Player does play through the YouTube API so I’m not sure we actually do violate the cookie laws as any cookies should be first party and non-marketing – Cookie Consent should be preventing your website from setting first party cookies until consent is agreed.

Another alternative is that you could audit any cookies set by your site and erase those cookie if the reader chooses not to agree to cookies.

The difficulty with FV Player trying to not set cookies until allowed is that there are literally dozens of cookie assent software companies. It could turn into a full-time job just managing cookie assent integration. If you find out that there’s a general standard we can follow which all the cookie assent software developers embrace, we would seriously consider adding that code.

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the suggestion.

We are not particularly fussed about preventing people from seeing videos unless they have agreed to cookies. The whole cookie law is horribly abused by large companies (I spend twenty minutes a day customising disagreement with cookies just to browse – I do use three computers and a mobile phone, but it’s crazy nonetheless).

If this feature is important to you and you’d like us to develop this for your website, we’d be happy to do it as custom development. That’s what’s great about FV Player. It’s freestanding code so your site can have exactly the features you need or want.

Hi Kurt,

We strongly recommend against manually managing complex videos and playlists in source code versions now. There’s too much margin for error which is why we moved away from simple shortcodes to custom interface and finally to database. But yes, if you follow the guidelines very carefully, they do still work.

For simple video posting, they are even very useful still.

Hi Jonatan,

Thanks for sharing the Vimeo experience with us. It’s a far cry from the “Unlimited” Vimeo promote in all their marketing materials. I’m surprised Vimeo did this to you when you were already on the top tier. Happily FV Player Pro is there to come to the rescue. Situations like this is why we made FV Player Pro platform agnostic.

You can go with Digital Ocean spaces for storing the video (not your website, just the videos, actual serving takes place mostly from the CDN) or you can store them on your own server. The costs as Martin pointed out are not high. If you’d prefer to store them on your own server (after your recent experience I can understand why), we’d be happy to help you set that up for $300 with BunnyCDN as the CDN. We could also write and run a custom script convert your entire video library for you via Coconut.co as a service for another $200. Otherwise you can easily add the videos one by one yourself.

As a general rule, instead of going with a dedicated server, you could probably go with a smaller VPS from Linode or Digital Ocean (about $80/month version should be enough) and store the actual videos in Digital Ocean spaces. Both solutions should work well, provide excellent security and both are much less expensive than any dedicated video CDN, whether Cloudflare video, Flowplayer or jwPlayer CDN.

Let us know how we can help you with your migration.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for writing. You wrote:

1tb video library and we used 70tb of bandwith last year, so thats why we moved out of vimeo ( price was too high and our own server allows us much more )

Vimeo should be a flat fee of about $200/year (pro account) for that amount of storage and serving. Did Vimeo try to make you pay overages?

Vimeo alternatives: we set up the FV Cocounut plugin with the most cost-effective hosting partners possible. Digital Ocean Spaces is as inexpensive as bulk hosting comes, about 10x cheaper than AWS. BunnyCDN is 4x cheaper than any other CDN available to smaller clients (not Warner, Apple, Pepsi, etc).

The plugin is free – our contribution to the community and an attempt to make Coconut.co which is a great service more accessible. If you’d like us to set up a custom script on your own hosting, we would be happy to do so. To set up a custom pipeline, add some sample content and train your team to use would be $500. If it’s just storage on your own server and BunnyCDN, we could implement this particular configuration for $300.

Please let me know what happened with your Vimeo hosting in more detail if you could. Thanks!

Hi Yairbr,

We haven’t made an update to the player which should break playback. So it’s likely a conflict between your ads and your mobile app.

Could you pick up our service “Make your theme work with video” to enable us to properly troubleshoot this on your site?

Thanks, Alec

Hi Girish,

We are working on allowing actions at other points during the video. It’s been a long time coming unfortunately.

If you’d like to custom code that interaction yourself, feel free. There’s no reason that you wouldn’t be able to control the player based on the events code with which for example we are able to feed data to Google Analytics.

Hi Hoshang,

1. The videos won’t stop playing, although the Vimeo technology will break in time.

If you are running a live site which people browse with up to date devices, you don’t want to let your licenses lapse.

2. Lapsed licenses get a 25% discount for renewal instead of a 60% discount for staying up to date.

3. You should not have to reapply your license, as the license is for domain not serial number.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Alec

Hi Geppo,

Please pick up a pro support incident to allowt our team can investigate your server configuration issues for you hands-on.

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

Hi Rhys,

Lbry.tv doesn’t seem to be running WordPress. Most of FV Player Pro functionality assumes WordPress presence.

If you were to move to WordPress, a single FV Player Pro license does work across subdomains. This means a single license would cover lbry.tv and any topic specific subdomain you chose to deploy.

Making the web work for you, Alec

PS. We might change subdomain policy in the future but it would remain very publisher friendly.

Hi Bonga,

We’d be happy to develop a MyCred.me module for FV Player for $350. In time, it costs us a lot more to develop this code but as it’s an enhancement, we can give you a substantial discount on the time. We’ll throw in three years of free pro license for FV Player your domain with your contribution.

Let us know.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Sideeque,

If you can’t show us an example on the sample website, this conversation is over sadly. We are not playing around. This is work for us and we help people who come to work and not to waste our time. FV Player is a plugin for public facing websites so there is zero excuse not to put up a sample page.

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the translations. You’ll be able to change the German translations but they will be overwritten on update. It would be quite a bit of work to allow people to have custom translations for each language. This is the kind of feature which has really heavy administrative overhead for little benefit to most users. We might be able to finagle being able to change the defaults for FV Player (which effectively would allow you to change these items to what you want but only in the primary language).

Alternatively (and much easier for us), is that you’d be able to change the po file but would have to add your custom DE po file back in with each update. That I think is the way we will go for now.

I’ll think about it. Feel free to present arguments and technical suggestions for how to do this without spending dozens of hours building a complex language management module.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Danielle,

You are missing the point of DRM. The point of DRM is to discourage professional pirates and not normal users. Professional pirates will certainly be inconvenienced more by DRM which appears periodically and briefly on varied parts of the screen at irregular intervals. That makes it almost impossible to block the information about who stole the video. A steady DRM mark is extremely easy to blur out even after screen recording.

If you would like to do your own custom coding for the DRM, we’d be more than happy to send you the info on how to modify the code yourself. Or just put DRM on top of your original videos if it’s that important to you (i.e. a watermark).

Martin will send you the hooks to create your own overlay over the video tomorrow. What you are looking for is watermarking not DRM. By making the overlay persistent, it’s extremely easy for a pirate to defeat using simple web development tools. Not that the current system is bulletproof but it’s subtle and effective.

Hi fomar,

We are actively working on improving our Gutenberg integration (and integration with other page builders – Gutenberg is more a page builder than editor). We’ll get this right. We’ll have a bit more time to work on this after 10 October.

Martin, when people are in Gutenberg now perhaps they shouldn’t get the normal FV Player button, just the Gutenberg block? It seems a bit pushy to have both there. On the other hand, it might be confusing not to have our editor button above the editor.

Let’s have another look at this together.

Hi Gbrother,

That’s a serious issue. I’m very sorry. Could you send us a WordPress admin login via email to the letsdraw site.

Hi Philip,

Your request is totally reasonable. I’m not sure why Juraj decided to talk about publishers who spam their users (I’ve removed that section) here. You don’t need Waterfall here but multiple ads, which indeed is discussed on that page of VAST Documentation (about two-thirds of the way down the page).

Let us know if you have any other questions please. Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hi Martin,

You wrote:

For the later two cases it’s impossible to fix. We could only add a code to our plugin which prevents these old versions from loading in order to not break the FV Player lightbox functions. But then it’s hard to guarantee that it these plugins keep working.

I’m strongly against running multiple lightboxes. People should either use the FV Player lightbox (FancyBox) or the other lightboxes. If publishers feel they need two lightboxes what they really need is a developer to sort out which lightbox they should use.

FV Player’s lightbox functionality should be flexible enough to work in anyone else’s lightbox (albeit with slight design changes).

WordPress is heavy and overloaded with scripts enough not to be adding two lightboxes!

Hi Kendell,

What Martin wrote is pretty clear. Please experiment with the player and events and the code which Martin has already supplied.

If you’d like further support on this issue, please pick up a pro support incident.

Thanks!

Hi Devin,

You wrote:

If there is a sense that extra work that needs to be done outside the normal scope of a ticket, this should be communicated to the customer on the front end so they can pay for pro support before the work is completed.

The bind for me is that I don’t want to tell the guys: don’t work on anything without permission from me or a pro support ticket. We keep the price of FV Player very low both for first buy and for renewals. What allows us to do that is that we charge for hands-on support. The rules are particularly customer friendly for valued long time FV Player publishers like yourself.

As this involved real development work on your website which is not directly related to FV Player itself, if you could pick up a pro support incident, I’d be very grateful.

Thanks so much!

Hi Devin,

To be honest, we’re already in pro support territory here as you’ve had Martin check your whole website for errors and had both Martin and Juraj trying to solve your issues for you.

Juraj’s first answer was free but you decided to continue to have us troubleshoot the issue.

Hi Françoise,

I did explain above including exact code on how to add paragraphs. You should open up a VTT file and read it to see what I mean.

The new version should be available almost immediately.

Hi Tio,

Definitely like the idea that embedded video playlist share would start the video which was shared.

Martin, we should change this right away.

Hi Bruno,

I’ve just found out that we are loading the Chromecast option by default in the free player. That we should not be doing.

We will turn off Chromecast by default and leave an option for users to enable it. If you’d like Chromecast’s js to be a local file, I’d still need to see some people who consider such an option worth paying for.

Hi Bruno,

Neither you nor anyone else are obliged to use Google’s Chromecast features. If it is illegal for you as a publisher to use the Chromecast features, do not use them.

Again, if having us make this improvement isn’t worth $75 to you, it certainly isn’t an urgent matter for me as it will cost me between $500 and $1000 of development time in testing and maintenance.

Stein and Bruno,

I share your concerns about Google and privacy.

I’m willing to move on this immediately if you each buy a pro support incident. You will be credited in the development notes as supporting a privacy improvement related to Chromecast.

Keep in mind, this means we have to keep updating that library regularly, which we will do, so it is a fair amount of work for us.

Hi Hannahon,

Thanks for your post. I’m sorry not to get back to you sooner. Your post somehow got picked up by Cleantalk (either email address or IP address: perhaps you were using a VPN).

FV Player Pro definitely support .m3u8. I’m not sure about the Shaka Packager version. Apparently Shaka Packager supports Widevine. FV Player does not support Widevine at this point (requires $100,000 up front investment to just get the documentation via expensive training sessions).

Bonjour Olivier,

Thanks for your post. I’m sorry not to get back to you sooner. Your post somehow got picked up by Cleantalk (either email address or IP address: perhaps you were using a VPN).

Were you able to solve this issue? If not, please let me know we’d love to help you solve it.

Hi Harold,

Thanks for your post. I’m sorry not to get back to you sooner. Your post somehow got picked up by Cleantalk (either email address or IP address: perhaps you were using a VPN). We’ve just discovered that there’s about five or six genuine posts buried in thousands of spam posts.

Did you solve this issue? If so, could you share the solution here. If not, we’re happy to investigate further with you.

Hi Tio,

Sorry this one was routed to the spam folder as well.

I don’t think Internet Archive is a reliable way to host videos. There’s two issues which worry me: ping time and then download speed. Based on my own use of Internet Archive it’s anything but speedy.

That said if you have a way to improve this handling without changing our playlist syntax (i.e. I’d suggest fixing the parsing of Internet Archive links), we’re always open to improvements.

Hi Katie D.,

We’re happy to provide documentation and to troubleshoot bugs in FV Player code for free.

If you would like hands-on help with transcoding it is available as a service.

There are over 100 video encoders available at any given time (some of them come and go) and about thirty video formats, it is simply not possible for us to troubleshoot them all.

Good luck with your transcoding! If you discover some tips which will help someone else in your position with Lightworks, please come back and share them.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Hi Reginald,

I’d like to support Bitchute as we support YouTube. YouTube becomes more stifling and censored every day to content creators. FV Player is a politically agnostic tool.

There’s no API right now for Bitchute as far as I can tell. We may be able to make Bitchute embedding possible anyway. We’ll take a look as soon as we can, probably next week.

Hi Katie,

Martin’s right. Video files which are 1. too big and 2. not on a CDN are always going to stutter. Lower resolution files for streaming are just fine. It’s your masters for encoding to lower resolutions which have to be high quality.

You shouldn’t go directly from Lightworks to streaming. The Lightworks export should be an intermediary to send to an encoder or streaming host.

The cheapest way to get an online CDN and proper encoding for your videos is to sign up for a Vimeo Pro account (not the Business account they promote) at $20/month.

Where are you hosting these videos Katie?

Could you share an example with us?

Thanks, Alec

Hi Crystal,

It’s not a question of like or not with Facebook video. Facebook deliberately makes it very difficult to work with video which is not directly uploaded to Facebook. We’ve noticed at one point Facebook posts with their native video did better so you may want to consider doing a manual upload to Facebook for videos for SEM purposes.

We do keep our eye on Facebook so if we’re missing something which should be working, please let us know or if we notice it, we’ll add it.

Hi Hoshang,

Thanks for your feedback and your kind words.

You should be able to update the *beta* version safely. But please wait for additional confirmation from Martin before doing so.

Vimeo statistics: no, playback from outside the Vimeo player doesn’t count for Vimeo views. It’s partly a way to motivate people to use their player (why I don’t know) and partly to stop publishers from faking views (and overloading their servers while publishers are at it).

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Hi BigBankClub,

Juraj is right: the big cloud providers like Google Drive and Dropbox deliberately cripple video streaming. Usually it’s by setting bandwidth too low for anything except SD.

We will set up a One Drive account and test this ourselves though, as we should have empiric data on how well One Drive works for hosting video.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Hi Video,

At this point, H265 support is limited. H265 only really runs properly on devices with dedicated hardware support (and software drivers for it). We will be adding additional H265 support as H265 slowly acquires support among streaming services over the next couple of years.

As Martin explained, FV Player does support H265 but setting up the streaming is a lot of trouble. It’s too early to troubleshoot H265 issues as part of our standard plugin license. So you are in for either a lot of troubleshooting yourself or you’ll have to pick up pro support incidents to have us troubleshoot your H265 issues for you.

Hi Daniel,

Sorry you are having so much trouble this is highly unusual.

Based on the error message you are getting, there’s something very strange with your site, which goes well beyond FV Player.

“It appears there are no Flowplayer scripts on your site, your videos might not be playing, please check. Check your template’s header.php file if it contains wp_head() function call and footer.php should contain wp_footer()!
It appears there are no jQuery library on your site, your videos might not be playing, please check.”

jQuery should always be loading.

Hi Bruno,

If you are on Mac, the best and one of the least expensive video converters is ffWorks (formerly iFFmpeg) which costs just €20.

Some past converters which were pretty good included Sorenson Squeeze but there’s no point in paying $200 or $400 for Sorenson Squeeze when ffWorks does the same job and costs €20.

On Windows, Handbrake is really the best. There’s XMedia Recode, StaxRip and FormatFactory if Handbrake’s interface doesn’t appeal to you. XMedia Recode looks great but it’s website is unfortunately German only.StaxRip is genuine FOSS, hosted on GitHub, while FormatFactory’s business model is unclear (sometimes they bundle anti-virus, sometimes they bundle search toolbars in their installer).

I’m not a Windows user so I haven’t compared conversion quality myself.

Thanks, Alec

PS. Avoid anything Wondershare or iSkysoft. They are absolutely crap Chinese copyware video converters and almost all of the reviews you’ll read for them are fake. Once they have your email address, you will be deluged with spam. It’s the same shared code, both borrow illegally from the GPL ffmpeg, without releasing source code. Nothing wrong with Chinese software per se – I quite like the subtitling tool Subtitle Edit Pro available on the Mac app store – but in this case, yes.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Alec Kinnear.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Alec Kinnear.