Hi John,

Thanks for the update.

High security does make it more difficult for customers on older devices or browsers to access your content. High security might not be worth it for you yet. The convenience of paying customers is more important than the inconvenience of pirates.

Hi Trong,

I’m the creative director at Foliovision. Juraj misunderstood an internal note: we do want to allow you to run ads multiple times within a playlist. We consider that okay as network television runs ads multiple times in a day or even a show.

We’d consider it spammy to keep reopening the same ad within the same video after the viewer had closed it. You should be careful not to annoy your viewers with too much advertising and repetitive advertising but I’m sure you know that.

Hi Marcin,

While this is a very interesting use of the potential of the FV Player technology, it’s very niche. We’d be happy to develop this for you but it would be custom development.

PS. Feel free to make an argument for why this feature is in high demand and would open enormous new markets to us.

Hi Daniele,

While FV Player offers good support for Google analytics and we support basic configuration issues, hands on work analysing your data and customising your reports would be paid development. Would you like to engage Foliovision to work with you on your Google analytics?

Hi Viktor.

You’re welcome. As I mentioned, I like the idea but it’s not high on our long, long list.

Hi Viktor,

This is a very good suggestion. We’ve added it to our potential improvements list but it’s quite a way down on what is a long list. If you’d like us to fast track this feature, I’d be happy to do so as custom development for $200.

Let us know.

We could consider importing existing Vimeo tags with videos. They would be non-editable within your website though (syncing is unreliable and always a huge time sink).

Hi Miles,

Glad you found the culprit.

We more or less don’t support W3 Total Cache as we are ex-users. Due to W3 Total Cache issues where they did not update W3 Total Cache in a timely way for two years, we lost our main hosting provider and suffered quite a few late nights. For many years we cobbled together a custom version of Hyper Cache v2 (v3 had its issues so we didn’t want to upgrade). These days we use WP Rocket. It’s not perfect and we loathe their piggyback marketing in the admin interface for Imagify but the support is pretty good. They’ve implemented at least five major improvements based on our requests over the years (we’ve waited three/four months for some of them though).

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

Hi William,

The reason Vimeo is still based on a shortcode is that maintaining a database in two places is quite inefficient. It makes more sense to just pull the whole channel or album in and maintain it (including screenshots) in Vimeo.

We’re very open to improving our Vimeo integration so if you run into any issues, just give us a holler.

Thanks, Alec

Hi John,

We looked at the ad skipping mechanism – you can see a demo here. Effectively we tell you how long the ad is but not how long until skipping. We’ll switch that around and have just a countdown to a skip button like YouTube. That might affect people who don’t want to allow skipping ads adversely but it’s a convention these days to allow ad skipping.

Martin, if there is no skip time, the countdown should show the full ad playback time on an ad (“Your video will start in xx seconds”). xx = the playback time.

Thanks.

Hi Neil,

The audio player is mainly there now as a convenience to video publishers who have the occasional audio file to publish to their site to avoid having to use two plugins.

If audio is a core component of your site, there are really full-featured audio plugins out there. I’m afraid if we get started with deeply customising the audio player we’ll be thrown off our core missions: to be the most feature rich and easiest to use video publishing solution for WordPress.

Hi egghead,

Thanks for the bug report.

We won’t be backdating support prior to Firefox 49. We have enough compatibility issues on our plate with almost annual major version updates to iOS and Android.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

PS. Juraj, please document this on a compatibility page as a known issue. Thanks.

Hi Artur,

I’m very sorry but if you cannot replicate the issue and get us an exact page with an exact iPhone model, we cannot take this investigation any further.

We will keep our eyes open for any similar reports from other publishers who hopefully will be able to give us more detailed information on the failure.

Again, we’d be happy to get more information from you about the issue any time in the future.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Hi Hoshang,

AWS setup is difficult. We offer very detailed documentation to help you with DIY. We are unable to troubleshoot AWS setup hands off though or we’d have to stop developing FV Player completely just to offer free support to Amazon.

We do have several services to help you with AWS setup. Feel free to book the one which suits your needs best. For Elastic Transcoder, it’s necessary to have working Cloudfront first.

Let us know if we can be of assistance.

Hi John,

We are working on viewer watch history. Adding bookmarks storage functionality and interface is very specialised. If you’d like to sponsor the feature, be in touch. Part of the deployment would require making changes to your theme to add a place to store these bookmarks.

Hey Alex,

How is it going with AWS? We’d like to be sure your issue is sorted.

Let us know.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Saif,

If you’d like us to troubleshoot your website, please book a pro support incident.

Hi Bruno,

There’s not much data going out with this call. I.e. an IP address requested the Chromecast library. If you’d like, you can have your developer create a local version or you could engage us to write that for you. The investment would be $200 (below cost, but I’m not against adding this to the plugin if a user feels strongly enough to participate in the improvement).

Best wishes, Alec

Hi Mllauce,

We’re planning a generic PHP version. We could probably set you up with encrypted videos now in a PHP framework.

Would that work for you?

Hi Christopher,

Thanks for your note.

Google’s demands on information required to index videos are somewhat unreasonable (Google have tightened them up due to spammers submitting huge sitemaps with video promised but no videos there). Each video has to be downloaded and stored by Google individually. If it’s done wrong, all of a site’s videos will be viewable directly on Google and on a specific URL, making it possible for a hacker to guess a site’s video addresses and download and pirate all the content.

After some tests, we’ve determined membership protected pages and their videos are fairly safe as Google won’t be able to index them at all.

What needs to be done to keep other spiders out of a site’s videos is reverse DNS lookup when Google comes calling, i.e. Google’s spiders will be allowed to view and download these files but others won’t. This is fairly challenging and cannot be done at the player level. It would require some custom configuration of both the web server and the cache plugin not to delay page load times substantially.

As membership videos are protected, I can see this as a less important security issues as we first apprehended. We will make advanced site map indexing available sometime in April (we have a very heavy workload). If you’d like to accelerate this work to next week with a development contribution of $100, we’d be happy to oblige you. You would be the first to get the feature and have our personal troubleshooting on your site until it’s working right for you. Of course the commercial value of this much work is more like $500 but as it will make the player better in the long run and your site is an informational one not particularly commercial, I’m able to make you this special offer for accelerated development.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

PS. As Martin noted, the issue with the video sitemap no longer working has to do with changes which Vimeo made to their default video formats which made it impossible for Google to determine if the videos are really there.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hi Tony,

Thanks for letting us know about the Gutenberg issues. Feel free to post some more information if you have it. We’re working hard on FV Player these days but we use and love our FV Clone Screen Options too.

Hi Deirdre,

As far as I know WordPress retired post formats in 3.6. We’re unlikely to support advanced sitemap capabilities for deprecated features at this point.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

This is a great suggestion, Peter. We will support Amazon Media Convert if possible. It may take us a couple of months to get there though as we are still working through major improvements via the database and WordPress 5 changes as well as a huge custom project.

Libby, I find the ads between each repeat on loop really oppressive. Between varied playlist items it makes more sense to me.

Why do you want to try to show many ads on a looped video? Who will want to watch so many ads just to see a looped video?

Hi Twig,

That’s very helpful. We discourage use of page builders on serious websites. Inevitably they interfere with core functionality and cause publishers no end of issues which would be avoided by building standard template files instead.

Page builders have their uses on experimental sites or small scale sites where a full custom design would be overkill. Even then, I’d recommend buying a good (and simply coded) theme without a built-in page builder. I’ve been building and maintaining WordPRess sites with both modest and millions/views for so long that my view is all about performance and stability.

Anything a publishers to do improve page load speed and reduce maintenance is a long term blessing. Getting rid of page builders is the single biggest possible step in the direction of stability and performance.

Cheers, Alec

Hi Martin,

We should really add support for albums as well if it’s at all possible.

Thanks, Alec

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 Catherine,

I’m afraid this is web development not support. We’re happy to send you or your developer to the correct documentation or fix any bugs but we can’t build or troubleshoot your website for you (well we can but it would be a separate deal).

With Pro Support we’ll log in and give you some first hand tips or a quick fix. Pro Support does not replace a web developer.

Thanks. Alec

Hi Fabio,

For us to take the next step and provide hands on troubleshooting for customer sites, it’s necessary to pick up a pro support incident first.

Here’s the link. We’ll collect your credentials during the pro support incident purchase.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Mdamion,

Thanks for your note.

This is custom web development dependent on what membership system you use.

Once you have a membership system in place, we’d be happy to set this up for $500 or we could include setting up our own PPV plugin within that package.

When I say membership, it could also mean pay per view (which is effectively membership of a single video on a time limited basis).

Alternatively you could just use two different [fvplayer] shortcodes, one for members and one for non-members.

Or this could be coded around the fv_flowplayer_args_pre filter, here’s an example.

Making the web work for you, Alec

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by Alec Kinnear. Reason: additional technical info

Hi Paul,

There’s no reason based on multisite that you’d need to keep the videos on both domains. We have clients on multisite and their media files are on the specific domain. I.e. here’s an image from this post on a complex multisite configuration.

You are welcome to choose a domain for your license and keep your files on the same domain. Or you can purchase one of our multisite packs or a simple add-on domain. We work hard to keep our licenses simple and affordable, whether for single domain or multiple domains.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Daniele,

Thanks for your follow up answer.

what percentage of video did you see;

We can track either last position in a video or total minutes watched of the video. We can’t track what percentage of a video you have seen effectively as the ongoing real time calculations (have you seen this minute or not) would be too intensive and put too high a load on publishers servers.

how many times did you see a video.

We can track number of viewings and total minutes watched. Would that work for you?

Your original request was for:

fv_wp_flowplayer_position_xxxx in wp_usermeta starts from zero. Is it possible to increase the counter so you can tell how many times you have seen the same video and the position reached in the last view?

This we can do.

Rapid implementation of these advanced tracking features would be $800 (it will cost us a lot more to build them but you are only supporting a small part of the custom development as an acceleration incentive). We will work closely with you to make sure the implementation suits your needs. There will be an admin screen with an overview of all users including total videos open and minutes watched. If you click on the user’s name you will get more detail with a full list of all the videos s/he has seen, the number of times s/he has opened the video, total minutes watched and last position in the most recent viewing of the video.

We can deliver this functionality within one month if you go ahead.

May I send you an invoice?

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Daniele,

This is a very interesting suggestion (tracking multiple views). Thanks for asking about it.

On reflection, it seem to me more like an an additional stats add-on which goes beyond just keeping position in the video than an extension of the current feature which monitors progress in a video. That could include the “Watched” page you describe. This is a great idea for a full featured add-on.

Our current plan is to continue to only monitor the user’s most recent position where s/he left the video. This seems to me to be core functionality (pick up where you last left off).

If you’d like us to take this on as custom development (it would be with a 50% discount as we may be able to reuse some of the code), I’d be happy to accelerate the development of full viewing tracking including a watched page with number of times you viewed and/or a video has been viewed.

Let us know your thoughts Daniele

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Hi Michael,

We could help you with the custom display you are looking for as custom web development. What we’d need to start is a visual mockup, along with the code as it is now and access to your dev server. We could do the work without access to your dev server but it would be more difficult as we’d have to set up custom Cloudfront media and permissions to replicate your environment.

If there are further technical issues with Cloudfront, let us know. We do want to solve those.

Thanks.

Alec

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Alec Kinnear. Reason: not enough detail

Based on what I read about Vooplayer, you’d be much better off with FV Player. Vooplayer hasn’t really been updated in four years (a lot has changed with online video). We update and improve FV Player almost every week.

To avoid the scary data loss warning, just deactivate FV Player and then delete it via FTP. This works even with plugins who would delete their own data when you uninstall (very useful for us).

Hi Evélina,

Very interesting notes. The current FV Player behaviour is basically the same as Amazon Prime video and Netflix behave when buffering. The priority is to show something which means the beginning is always in low res.

Even NFL video works the same way.

A slow start time will really worry people (that video is not working at all). We will add this option but you’ll want to be careful about it. You may get some unexpected complaints about the change.

Thanks, Alec

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for taking the time to point the login issue out and debug it in depth. It’s not an easy solution as we don’t want to force people to log in to view.

We could force log in to post but if you are going back to a post on a different device that won’t work. As Edo pointed out, there was a change in our caching plugin which made this issue far more acute (even disposing of the cookie on the existing device).

We’ll keep a close eye on this issue.

Cordial regards,

Alec

Hi Devin,

Thanks for the in-the-field feedback. What should be happening now is “Auto” by default. If you choose a different resolution, you then get that resolution. My goal is to keep the interface as simple as possible so it seems better to me to give everyone auto but if you choose to start controlling your streams manually that’s what you get until you change your mind.

Resolution is device dependent and not account dependent so just because someone picked 480p on his or her telephone doesn’t mean s/he is stuck with it on his or her desktop.

Per se I don’t want to add an auto button but my mind is still open if there are a lot of requests.

Happy New Year!

Alec

Hi Evelina,

Thanks for sharing this feedback. It means a lot to me (I hate annoying plugins).

Some suggestions:

1. Don’t make those updates (we ourselves created a plugin to manage and restrain WordPress updates called BusinessPress). Not every FV Player update even on Beta is absolutely necessary.
2. If you don’t need the cutting edge features, please move to stable. We keep stable as written on the box, stable.

When we’ve moved to Flowplayer Core 7 before Christmas, the updates will slow down a bit but Beta will remain very active.

FV Player is one of the few plugins in the entire WordPress universe which has both beta and release versions together so you don’t have to waste your time manually installing and uninstalling versions (you can switch between them with just a dropdown).

What we will not ever move to again though is manually distributing specific versions outside of the upgrade cycle. That is a nightmare for both the developers and the users. I can’t believe anybody develops software that way. We should publicize our innovation more.

Thanks again for the feedback though! I hope the advice above will help you bring the update situation under control.

Amitiés, Alec

Hi David,

Thanks for your post:

Yesterday I received the message about the black Friday sale and the roll out of new features. It mentioned that “FV Player core 7 is in beta already along with a new player interface…”

If I purchase Pro today, will I be able to access the core 7 beta features immediately using the dropdown setting in Pro?

Some of them. It’s very beta. Do not put it into production please.

If so, is the Chromecast feature a part of the core 7 code where I can test it out with my devices?

It should be but it hasn’t been tested yet.

Thanks for trying FV Plugins.

Alec

Hi Aaron,

Please let us know how it goes with getting flash out of your workflow and if there’s anything else we should add to those guides to make them easier to follow.

Thanks!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hi Marin,

The issue is with your theme. There are a number of z-indexes but not all major elements have z-index, some even have relative z-index. You have to set z-index to all elements or none of them. We already have a z-index of the maximum value in our CSS, but if it’s parent has this set to 0, video will be 0 too.

You could have your CSS designer correct your theme for z-index issues or we’d be happy to do so for $140 (it would be two pro support incidents as we have to correct the issues for both desktop and mobile). The theme is built in a way, that the mobile navigation is hidden on the right and slides in while pushing the whole page content to the side. This often creates position and z-index bugs. If you are thinking of a redesign, right now would be a great time to do it (pre-test your new theme for video playback with advanced options – most theme shops handle z-indexes right but the ones who don’t probably do it wrong on all their themes).

The workaround with the native player will continue to work for you.

Let me know what we can do to help you get where you want to go.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Alec

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 Pádraig,

Thanks for the quick bug report, Pádraig. I’m not a big mobile user (particularly for recreational activity) so I didn’t realise the hover over wouldn’t work on mobile (logically it should follow the finger). I’m glad the fix will help.

The old style design template should be back early next week. Sometime after that we’ll add full custom playlist templates for people with PHP skills.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Kevin and Ren,

Are you referring with “thumbnail” to splash screens for your videos or are you referring to the timeline thumbnails which appear on YouTube videos when you run your cursor across the timeline in a desktop web browser?

Please let me know.

Thanks!

Thanks Jair! We’re looking into accelerating multiple languages for transcripts.

Hi Clod,

Thanks for suggestion.

I see exactly what you mean in terms of YouTube start times. I’m a keen advocate of just allowing people to post a raw YouTube or Vimeo link into comments and have it turn into a suitably sized FV Player instance.

This is partially implemented now. We’ll improve both performance and preferences for videos in comments and even posts (so that if I write a post I can just enter a carriage return, paste https://youtu.be/eRrnUD6MtWo?t=782 add another carriage return and get a bare bones FV Player instance on save. We’ve already done this for a custom Markdown implementation for long description fields for our real estate clients. This functionality is not working here in our forums yet as this example will show.

https://youtu.be/eRrnUD6MtWo?t=288

In terms of starting at a time, YouTube let’s us copy the exact link to starting at exactly that time on YouTube (pasteable between browsers). I believe we can call a YouTube video at a specific time via the API. Example: https://youtu.be/eRrnUD6MtWo?t=782 The time value is a simple seconds count so there’s nothing mysterious here.

With Vimeo it’s more difficult as there’s no human interface for copying that start time. If it’s possible via API to start at a specific time, we could add some easy syntax (which you could show to your users above the comment box.

For example: https://youtu.be/eRrnUD6MtWo Start:4:48 which would be the equivalent of https://youtu.be/eRrnUD6MtWo?t=288. Or we could just observe the YouTube format only (tell the readers to add time values in seconds).

Hopefully we could do the same with Vimeo. If we can do it with clean MP4’s, I’m game to do it there as well. It may be a few iterations before we can add this functionality everywhere but we can probably get YouTube start times into comments pretty quickly.

So yes this is coming.

Now that you have some more information, how would you like to see the syntax and how would it best work for your users? I can’t guarantee we’ll do it your way (we must implement the feature in the best way for most users). Nevertheless, let’s start from your concrete use case.

Making the web work for you, Alec

• This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by Alec Kinnear.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by Alec Kinnear.

Hi Frank,

The best thing you can do for your site is get rid of as much extraneous code as you can. Themes which include a lot of functionality usually break many plugins (including well-coded ones like ours). We’re both plugin and theme users as well as plugin authors so we’ve seen it all.

As Martin recommends the best thing to do would be to remove some of this code and just use the built-in and ultra compatible lightbox functionality within FV Player (based on the open source and highly rated ColorBox if you are wondering what the code is).

If you’d like us to clean up the theme compatibility issue for you hands on, please don’t hesitate to pick up a pro support incident.

We want Exoclick ads to work great for you, please be in touch on how it goes.

Thanks!