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].
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.
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.
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.
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)".
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.
FV Player has new version - 6.0.5.22, that brings a cool new feature called Video Links. Imagine that you want to show someone a certain part of a video. Until now, you had to share a link to a page and then add something like "Check out that killer solo at 2:34!".
From now on, FV Player will allow you or anyone who watches the video generate a link with a certain point on the timeline. Anyone who clicks that link will be directed right to the video and it will start playing from the given point. The best thing is that it works with all videos (with the exception of live streams of course), no matter where they are hosted.
Video Links adds a new button to the top bar in the player, right between social media sharing buttons and Embed button.
Jump to the second of the video you would like to share and click on the Link button. This will generate a new link to the video that will contain the time information. The new link will be automatically copied to your clipboard - you will know that because a message will appear, that will say "Video Link Copied to Clipboard".