Hi Pádraig,

Thanks for the detailed notes. We are in the middle of adding a lot more customisation options for the player interface. First stop is a YouTube style interface (without the annoying ads of course!) for people who have visitors used to that interface.

Your notes are a good start to further improvements. You may be interested in a long article I published today with ideas on how to improve the WordPress Editor and the WordPress editing experience.

Much appreciated.

Alec

Hi Shez,

As you have an existing account, it’s not that easy for me to merge you to the m….m…@hotmail.com account. Ideally you’d check the m….m…@hotmail.com account for the welcome emails and use that account to log in to collect your licenses.

If you post the domains you’d like to license here, I’d be happy to add them by hand right away so you can just get started.

We’ll get started on the IP address feature next week.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Alec

PS. Martin, we’d like to merge the two accounts and resend the welcome emails to the Gmail account after making the Gmail account primary. I’d like to be able to do this myself. Let’s talk about how to handle this kind of situation in the future in an easy way.

Hi Shez,

The immediate fix with ID/IP address. The Widevine support will take us a while but it will come eventually no matter what.

Thanks!

Hi Shez,

Thanks for your initiative and forward looking ideas in this area. DRM is an area I think about often as well. There is an issue with your solution:

For the time being, I would like to be able to display the users ID and IP address in such a way that says, “this video is being viewed by ******” and then display their IP address as well and the date.

It’s simple enough to just disable this display in CSS via inspect element. Of course someone needs to have some expertise in web development or at least HTML to do so but it really only annoys paying users.

That said, I’m willing to implement exactly what you requested if you have $200 to throw at the solution.

Cordial regards, Alec

PS. The worst kind of DRM and licensing inconveniences the paying users and doesn’t stop pirates. We work really hard at Foliovision that our own licensing doesn’t get in the way of paying users (you’ll notice that the upgrade to FV Player Pro is almost completely automatic – we plan to start recording domain ahead of time so it’s fully automatic).

We’ll work towards a Widevine solution (Google and Netflix) in 2017.

Hi Luria,

Can you repost your example? I’m going to run a test of some syntax:

* list item one
* list item two

1. number list item one
2. numbered list item two

And more code in Markdown style:

Thanks Alfons for your detailed notes.

Alfons we’ll work with you on format priority until we get the fallback working just right. Mobile playback and formats are a moving target: we tune the priorities to stay up to date with best practices, along with existing browser technologies, security methods and current devices.

Hi Tony,

Here’s what the simplest solution.

1. You test our player with some existing or new posts.
2. If you are happy with FV Player, you install Search Regex and replace the existing video shortcodes with either our fvplayer format or with simple video tags (standard WordPress video format).

If you aren’t happy with FV Player, please let us know why.

We will consider adding support for jwplayer and a few other proprietary formats in the future. It’s generally better though to convert the tags with Search Regex.

Thanks!

Hi Kobus,

You’re welcome for the support.

I appreciate your issues with server performance. KeyCDN is very inexpensive with no minimums at .04¢/GB. If you turn off JetPack you may find that your sites run faster.

Trusting Automattic or Jetpack is like trusting Google: extremely naive. When you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. Your site and your users are being datamined, your business is being made dependent on a free service which can be taken away at any time.

Inexpensive services I like (Vimeo for instances). Free services I do not. Freestanding free software is the only free which is really free.

Jetpack is single handedly setting out to undermine freestanding WordPress and the independent developers who have made WordPress great. It’s not the core at WordPress which is of value (still fairly mediocre starting from spaghetti code a decade ago). It’s the always been the plugins and the plugin authors who make WordPress an ecosystem worth using.

You can’t say what I’ve said publicly about Jetpack or the moderators ban you at both WordPress.org and/or WPtavern. That’s how Jetpack manages to maintain some semblance of a positive reputation. That’s how Matt Mullenweg and Automattic roll. Hijacking the project we all helped build, suppressing dissent.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Ron,

Please don’t update the player for now. Reverting to the previous version was the right way to go when the update didn’t go as planned.

We’re really sorry about these issues. We’re doing everything we can (including stable and beta in a single plugin) to minimise the chances of any compatibility issues affecting the end user. We’ll make further improvements very soon.

Hi Martin,

There are real issues with WordPress 4.6.1 and the latest FV Player Pro. I’ve just helped TJ revert to an earlier version (which does work with WordPress 4.6.1). The issue may be in the beta code. What’s particularly tough is that once a person is in the beta stream, s/he can’t revert to normal version, even if s/he deletes the beta folder within the pro plugin (that still leavesl a fatal error if the client was already on beta).

Fatal error: Can't use function return value in write context in /home/sitename/public_html/w/wp-content/plugins/fv-player-pro/beta/fv-player-pro.class.php on line 2299

We should also have an older stable version available in My Downloads for these cases. When redownloading FV Player Pro from the free player we should turn off beta every time (the user will have to reenable beta versions manually).

Thanks for looking at this as soon as you can.

Alec

Hi Steve,

Glad to hear you are still rocking out with the CPG. Looks like a lot of fun.

We’re still looking at this. Martin will continue to give you some tips, but if you’d like us to really delve in and set up your site for your complex multiple streaming HLS case, it would be additional development. Let me know if you’d like our hands on help.

Have a great weekend!

Thanks.

Alec

PS. As Martin noted, it’s important to keep the communication in one place (the forum) so he doesn’t have to pull info out of emails and post it here himself.

Hi Mitch,

We can’t easily solve this issue (maintaining sound at slow speeds). If you find someone else successfully offering very slow speeds with sound on video, please let us know and we’ll take a look to see if we can do something similar.

Thanks!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Keith,

You’re absolutely right: this is a terrible user experience and we’re dedicated to making sure it doesn’t happen again. We haven’t had an issue with our SSL certificate so if you could get information from your host about what they don’t like about our SSL setup, we’d be delighted to rectify the issue. For the moment, manual updates should work fine.

We are working on fixing this, we just need more info.

Thanks!

Alec

Hi Marius,

We have an open email ticket where we are upgrading you from 5 to 20 licenses for $195.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Kobus,

Thanks for the field report. I’m delighted to hear ads are working well for you. Don’t hesitate to contact us with any other questions.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Hi mdchev,

Creating sprites from the thumbnail files would be an administrative nightmare. Martin’s suggestion of getting a CDN is a good one. KeyCDN is almost free, with no minimum usage requirement or monthly fee.

Could you try KeyCDN first?

Alec

Kobus, FV Player Pro has so many features we don’t expect anyone to use them all or even more than a third of them.

FV Player Pro works with intelligent defaults so we make only a small core set of features available by default and you can enable whatever extras you need so that in the posting workflow, you or your client can work quickly and clearly.

This is different than most video plugins which have a muddled and overly complex interface. We keep the interface as lean as possible and the possibilities as wide as possible.

I hope these tips help.

Hi Kobus,

Are you sure you don’t want some of the other pro features beside just the VAST/VPAID feature? There’s a list on our home page and a more detailed list here of what’s done and what’s going to be done soon: https://trello.com/b/nMI1nPFC/fv-player

Thanks.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Fabio,

Thanks for your notes. It’s very helpful. We’ll definitely look into the performance issues. Adding captions is a real pandora’s box but yes, captions should be available and hidden in the html for someone to be able to add them to their playlists.

Look and feel. I agree. Playlists should be much sexier. If you’d like to do some further work on the design and with screenshots, we can implement them as you like.

Thanks.

Alec

Hi Ed,

I’m sorry about your rough experience here. We’re going to do three things to make sure you and other pro users don’t get stranded like this ever again.

1. separate the dev version and the release version more sharply so that normally pro users won’t get a development version. We might even force opt-in every time for updating to a new dev version (Martin, let’s talk about this).
2. fallback button. If you do update to a version that breaks your site, you’ll be able to automatically go back to your previously working version with a single click (Martin, we’ll have to record installed working versions on a site to be able to do this).
3. automated testing. This is early for us but we’ll be building some test suites which will test as much functionality as we can program so that when we do release even a dev version, the

We didn’t need to do as much of this (fallback versions, automated testing) before as the plugin had fewer features (hence fewer internal conflicts) and our iteration pace was slower and it was usually a single programmer working on the code.

I.e. this is good news for you (though the symptoms this time were not fun):

1. we’re adding more great features like easer to use timeline actions like start screens and end screens.
2. there’s a bigger programming team working on FV Player Pro allowing us to move faster in adding new features and improving existing ones.
3. all of the above also applies to documentation and demos: there will be more and better documentation and demos.

Once again my apologies for the rough experience in the last week but we have learned from the experience and will take concrete steps to protect you and your site in the future, Ed.

Thanks for being part of Foliovision!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Joel,

We’d love to reach your audience. We have a referral program for all buyers with a 20% commission for all referrals so your solid recommendation could work well for both of us.

Martin’s point is a good one: if the user closes the browser and returns two hours or two days later, the webinar will pick up in the same place where the user left last time which does not seem live.

I guess once a visitor has opened the webinar there should be a timer attached to his IP (this could cause problems in venues where you have 500 people at a seminar and you send them to a live webinar) which times out and at that point. this visitor wouldn’t be able to open or close the webinar at all.

Vimeo Pro is no problem. We may be able to come up with a solution for mobiles (iOS and/or Android). Keep in mind mobile video playback is a moving target so perfect coverage with this kind of trick feature across all versions is unlikely but we’ll do our best to make it work.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Andre94,

Thanks for the screenshot.

Please pick up a pro support incident and we’ll be happy to fix this live on your WPMLS site.

Thanks.

Making the web work for you, Alec

HI Victor,

Thanks for the bug report. Martin will check out your issues on Monday morning. In the meantime, until then could you please use the previous version of the plugin.

Could you also send us a URL where we can see the issue in action?

Thanks and have a good rest of the weekend.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Guys,

We’ll have a fix ready for you on Monday morning.

If you do a reinstall (i.e. delete both free and pro and reinstall) do you get the same issue)?

Making the web work for you,

Alec

Hi Clod,

1. For clickable text, we have built-in text ad functionality where the clickable links can show up at exactly the time you want. I’d hate to mix subtitles and the text ad functionality. You can make the text ads look like your subtitles. Adding clickable links to subtitles themselves would break a lot of standards and create device playback issues.

2. I’m not a fan of bilingual subtitles but I can see the case for two sets of subtitles. What I’d suggest first though is including both sets of subtitles within a single set (i.e. if you are teaching English/Spanish). That would work. If you need to mix and match multiple sets, then indeed we’d have to add a second set of subtitles (at the top and bottom as you suggest). Tell us more.

4. We’re waiting to hear from you about the issues with UTF-8 subtitles. Please send us a sample page.

Thanks.

Making the web work for you, Alec

This feature request has made it to our new Trello board for Feature requests (work in progress): https://trello.com/c/K8pYiXbr

It’s in the upcoming category. Current behaviour shares the page along with an image thumbnail (not the video!) which is not bad but not specifically video sharing.

Our strategy for now is to focus on including the right tags so that when a video is shared on Facebook, the video gets picked up as video and not as an image and a link to the page. This should be the new default for Facebook shares (if someone wants to share the page as a page, usually there are other share buttons there).

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Alec Kinnear. Reason: adding current behaviour

Hi dos2001,

Your other plugins may have a conflict with FV Player (if plugins force loading of old versions of jQuery this can create trouble). Try disabling your other plugins (half at a time usually works) until you find which one is conflicting. Once you get this far we can help resolve the conflict.

If you’d like us to troubleshoot the whole issue, please buy both pro license and a pro support incident and we’ll both find and fix the issue for you.

Thanks for using FV Plugins!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi SaintlyMic,

I’m very interested in your feature request. To be honest, just uploading videos to your http webhost is probably not a good idea (leaving aside potential content issues). Video streaming requires a different server setup than good http streaming. Video requires a few very powerful streams with some tolerance for latency (probably hard drives) while HTML/CSS/JS require a lot of IO cycles without necessarily much bandwidth per connection (much better suited to SSD).

What you probably want to do is set up some custom programming to dump the uploaded videos into Amazon or Vimeo (via API) or a similar service. As each client will want to use different hosting, we can’t build this as one site fits all (although we might build Vimeo out for fun). Feel free to engage us to make this work for you and your site and with your hosting provider though.

I’m keen to hear your thoughts on the above.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Martin,

I don’t think we want to add to even slower loading pages. Most commercial websites have become a junkyard of competing technologies, all working together so slowly to drive an intelligent user to disable javascript altogether.

What we can do is allow forced loading of FV Player on page load (should be excluded if not in immediately visible content) and we can disable our checking scripts within lightbox functions.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Martin,

Could you please enable a simple button in the Vimeo Advanced Preferences which allows our clients to switch back to Vimeo iframes on demand across their entire site? This way if there are issues with non-Vimeo players over a short period of time our pro users have a convenient fallback.

Thanks.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Don,

Thanks for the suggestion.

This is the kind of customisation that we encourage clients to add themselves or to engage us to do for them. If the work turns out well, we sometimes then include it in core.

For instance if you know that the person has failed georestrictions, you could take the player away completely and offer them the message of your choice based on their country.

Would you like to engage us to provide the structure to offer a georestricted warning within the player?

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Jayt,

We’re delighted to support Playwire ads (VAST/VPAID is part of their service). Let us know if you find any issues.

Supporting their playlists would be more a migration tool. I’d suggest just building the playlists in FV Player (hosting and ad platform agnostic!) to avoid lock-in with any one provider.

Every other provider out there is slowly going for lock-in, to make it impossible for you to move to another ad provider or host. At Foliovision, we’ve loathed lock-in for a very long time. If you read that full story about Typepad you’ll see why. Same thing applies to Disqus (although it is just possible to rescue one’s comments out of Disqus, it’s a significant investment of time or money to do it properly).

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Cube,

Thanks for your feedback.

Multiple subtitles are a priority. Custom labels for languages are not for the moment.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Giovanni,

The pro license only works on the domain and subdomains. If you put your dev domain on a sub domain you’ll be fine.

Thanks!

Alec

Hi Miguel,

The Samsung web browser is not meant for streaming videos, especially full screen. Apparently you should create a Samsung app for that purpose.

Hi Balduro,

Thanks for letting us know about your issue. Setting up Amazon S3 or Cloudfront is not easy. We’d be happy to do it for you: https://foliovision.com/player/pro-setup

In this case, we’ll go into your Amazon account and your website and make sure it’s all working correctly. If you think we should make a change to the documentation, please let us know and we’ll be happy to make that change.

Thanks!

Alec

Hi Martin,

I’m not interested into trying to build URL shortener. Twitter automatically URL shortens these days and there’s huge security issues with shortened links so they are bad practice in this day and age. Tracking code at the end makes more sense.

We could add a preferences box for Sharing Options for pro users (or also for free for that matter) to change the default text in one easy place. Most people wouldn’t need to open it up but it would be there for them.

Global options only though.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Martin,

There are mixed reports. JW Player claims RTMP .mp3 works (making the protocol look very simple) while Wowza suggests mp3 doesn’t stream via RTMP.

Amazon themselves suggest it is possible. Here’s a very old guide for Cloudfront RMTP which also suggests it’s possible to broadcast .mp3 with RTMP.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Fiona,

Could you send us this test page for us to take a look at? We’ll let you know if pro would help you or if there is just a change you need to make to your page.

Thanks!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Mike,

Great. We’ll wait to hear from you.

Thanks!

Making the web work for you, Alec

You’re welcome Mike. Dealing with those .net issues (Microsoft compatibility with open source) should be enough to make a person call a crisis line for counselling.

Best wishes,

Alec

Hi Mike,

I’m sorry but struggling with .net on an edge case like this is not something we know about. If we did, I’d tell you.

If you’d like us to try to track the .net issues down, we could do so but it would be as web development work.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Mike,

I’m sorry to hear you are having difficulties with our video player. Could you please post us a sample page where these issues appear?

Thanks!

Alec

Toggling captions will be very soon, Gary. We are just over the hump of the Flowplayer 6 core public release and will be able to roll out the new features now available in core fairly quickly.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Malcolm,

Please don’t make it live now. Right now it’s 19:40 on a Friday night and Martin will probably not be online.

Thanks!

Alec

Hi Chi,

Thanks.

Please try not to open multiple threads for a single issue as it’s significant time for us to clean up the mess.

Making the web work for you, Ale

Hi Ganesh,

Thanks for your question. Debugging Cloudfront is a real nuisance, I agree.

We do have a very detailed guide here: https://foliovision.com/player/serving-private-cloudfront

If you’d like us to set up your Cloudfront for you we do so as a service for $100 per site.

https://foliovision.com/player/pro-setup

Our lead programmer is away until Thursday. He may have a quick tip for you when he sees your post.

Thanks!

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Kenneth,

Thanks for writing.

The YouTube API is a lot more restrictive than Vimeo’s methods. It could be that AB looping is not working with YouTube (if it’s not working, I’m not sure if we’ll be able to make it work).

We’ll get back to you at the end of the week about whether you should expect AB looping on YouTube in the future.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Vakas,

FV Player is a perpetual license at $75. Right now annual renewal of updates and support is $25 if you want to keep getting new features and improvements.

FV VAST/VPAID is an annual subscription at $150. We may consider a lowered price for renewal at some point but for now it’s just a flat subscription rate.

We try to keep our pricing as simple as possible. Life is complex enough without our software making it more complicated.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the feedback.

We’ll think about it. There is no universal playback format (hence why YouTube still has about seven different streams available, albeit some are just size variations).

Even Vimeo has four different versions (3 x .mp4, 1 x .m3u8 HLS for streaming).

Making the web work for you, Alec