Foliovision: Making the web work for you

Hello deeveearr,

It’s a strange issue. I see you are using CSS on the <pre> HTML tag to get rid of the issue. FV Player does not create such HTML markup, so I wonder where it is coming from.

Please let us know what post editor do you use. It might be the standard block editor (Gutenberg), or the Classic Editor, or even some page builder.

Then the next step will be to check your post HTML source code to see if the [fvplayer] shortcode is wrapped in any HTML which should not be there. It’s possible that it’s simply wrapped in a <pre> tag. It could happen if you copy-pasted the shortcode from a page of documentation.

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Please post further issues to our own support forums at https://foliovision.com/support/fv-wordpress-flowplayer to help us keep track of the issues.

Thanks,
Martin

Hi Russ,

Thanks for your note and thank you for supporting FV Player.

What FV Player is is a video player, one which plays from most major hosts, whether YouTube, Vimeo, Bunny, or self-hosted. Setting up a working encoding pipeline is a challenge. We created FV Coconut, which is completely free, created very detailed documentation to allow people to set up their recording pipeline themselves.

Setting up FV Coconut (free workflow, much easier than AWS Media Encoder, and far less expensive) is something which about half of our users can do themselves. It’s hard.

You can understand that for $75 (the price of FV Player), we cannot personally set up and troubleshoot an encoding pipeline for half our users. FV Player already includes internal advertising, transcripts, subtitles, advanced playlist functionality, which is what you paid for.

We know self-hosted video can be confusing and it’s set up difficult, which is why we offer both consulting and set up services so those who would like the work done for them can have that.

My recommendation to you is that if you wish to save time on setting up encoding, you pick a ready to go host like Vimeo whom we fully support. Vimeo’s basic pro account is about $200/year and includes 20GB of encoding per week, along with 2TB bandwidth per month. We don’t recommend Vimeo to high volume publishers (their bandwidth overages are expensive) but it’s great for smaller publishers. When/if traffic goes way up, with FV Player you can mix and match and put your latest and highest traffic videos on self-hosted and continue to use your Vimeo archives.

If you do want a self-hosted solution, we’ve sent you a number of questions directly in our own support ticket system but you haven’t answered Martin there unfortunately. For instance he’s waiting for your a copy of the Javascript console output when you suffer a “blank page when trying to upload a new video”. If you answer our questions in your support tickets, we will be happy to provide technical answers. Or you can engage us to personally troubleshoot your encoding setup. If it turns out to be a bug in our player, we are happy to credit the pro support incident for the future or extend your license if you prefer.

BTW, you are not paying twice for encoding at Coconut:

The result of these errors is a re-upload, and paying coconut to process the file twice.

If an upload fails, Coconut doesn’t charge the end user. The owner/developer over at Coconut is scrupulously fair and his pricing is very reasonable.

We process terabytes of data every week via Coconut, with very rare failures. We know the system works. We have FV Player clients who serve terabytes of videos every week from Digital Ocean Spaces with no issues for years on end, enjoying huge savings over any other video host.

If you are not at those volumes for now, the FV Player + Vimeo combination would save you a fair amount of time and headache in building your training business, Russ.

Best of luck with your video setup. If you answer the open support questions, we’d be happy to help.

Kind regards, Alec

• This reply was modified 2 months ago by Foliovision: Making the web work for you.

Hi Russ,

Thanks for posting a sensible, balanced review.

FV Coconut is a free product which allows publishers to save thousands on dedicated video hosting. We are unable provide a sophisticated free product and free support. I’m very sorry FV Coconut did not work for you.

We’d be happy to help you with any Coconut upload issues. I’m not sure why Martin didn’t answer your more specific follow-up questions. We should have.

When publishers are using page builders which interfere with the WordPress Media Library, we do charge for hands on support to sort out their issues on their own website. In that case, we either solve a publisher’s issue properly or are happy to refund you. When a Pro Support Incident reveals an FV Player bug, we always credit the Pro Support incident for future use.

Personally I use a lot of free software and regularly offer FOSS authors rewards to fix issues with their software. Mostly they won’t do it: not for love, not for money. I’d be delighted to find developer-authors who will actually fix issues, especially hands-on.

In your case, it looks like Beaver Builder is interfering with FV Coconut (as FV Player is compatible with Learndash). We carefully follow the WordPress plugin development guidelines. Unfortunately page builder authors mostly break those guidelines to do what they do. Learndash is complex software so it’s possible there may be a new issue. Any Learndash we would fix for free.

Thanks for trying FV Player.

Making the web work for you, Alec

• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by Foliovision: Making the web work for you.

Hi Rik,

You wrote:

I see three cdn sites but can’t use a third party such as Dropbox to stream videos, is this possible?

Dropbox is a very poor choice for video hosting. Any of the trick workarounds like hosting videos on Google, Azure or Dropbox will end badly. Those companies do not want to provide free video bandwidth.

Looking for a player that offers a ‘premiere intro’ like youtube.Set the time, the date and the player would show a countdown time and date, a little like youttube.

First you’d have to find a livestream host. There would be a way to animate an introduction at the start of FV Player using standard web technology.

Also, many of subscribers are hard of hearing and need subtitles on the fly, not sure if FLA can do that or perhaps offer a .srt ability?

FV Player has the best .srt and transcript support of any video player I know.

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hello achimfalk,

The video is set to autoplay, is that right?

Chrome started to block audible autoplay back in 2018: https://foliovision.com/2018/05/video-autoplay-issues Audible autoplay become available once the user has interacted with the website videos – it uses the Media Engagement Index (MEI)?which you can check on chrome://media-engagement/

There’s not much FV Player can do about it, but in FV Player 8 we will ensure a video has to come into the viewport to autoplay.

Firefox blocks audio for videos which autoplay too: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-autoplay

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Themeix,

Thank you for your bug report.

We have fixed this and the bugfix will be part of the next release.

If you need it right now please reinstall FV Player from this link: https://foliovision.com/downloads/fv-wordpress-flowplayer.zip

Please post further issues to https://foliovision.com/support to help us keep track of the issues.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Themeix,

Thank you for your bug report.

We have fixed this and the bugfix will be part of the next release.

If you need it right now please reinstall FV Player from this link: https://foliovision.com/downloads/fv-wordpress-flowplayer.zip

Please post further issues to https://foliovision.com/support to help us keep track of the issues.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Alessio,

We have fixed this and the bugfix will be part of the next release.

If you need it right now please reinstall FV Player from this link: https://foliovision.com/downloads/fv-wordpress-flowplayer.zip

Please post further issues to https://foliovision.com/support to help us keep track of the issues.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello mabdellahi,

We found a bug in the video duration check related to that security fix. Now it’s fixed and version 7.5.46.7212 is out.

Please report future issue using https://foliovision.com/support/ to help us keep track of the issues.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello deevearr,

Are you sure you used the Bunny Stream feature? FV Player lets you drag&drop upload feature with Bunny Stream and the videos are fast to play.

Maybe you just used MP4 videos with Bunny CDN, which can get slow if they are not encoded for web.

You started a ticket about your DropBox issues on Foliovision.com, so please let’s continue there if you are still having issues.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello deeveearr,

Thank you for the link. I see there’s FV Player with a Dropbox link to video and it fails to play.

When I open that Dropbox link directly it plays the video. The format of the link looks like this (I’m obfuscating the {id} and {key}):

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/%7Bid%7D/Summer-Recruitment-2024-Titles-Edit.mp4?rlkey={key}&raw=1

The reason why it does not play in FV Player is that it probably checks some of the HTTP request headers, such as the referrer header. When I insert it using bare HTML5 video tag it won’t play either:

<video controls><source src="https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/{id}/Summer-Recruitment-2024-Titles-Edit.mp4?rlkey={key}&raw=1" type="video/mp4" /></video>

So it’s not a problem with FV Player, but a more general isse.

I found that it actually depends on the dropbox.com cookies which you browser has.

So the Dropbox link cannot play the video reliably, as they probably don’t want you to be using their services for video playback anyway.

Or are you using some paid plan which should let you use video links with 3rd part players?

Please post your issues to https://foliovision.com/support/ in the future to help us keep track of the issues.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello milanmaster,

Thank you for the follow up!

Did you find anything in Wordfence that might explain why it would block FV Player’s editor Ajax saving? Seems like wp-admin -> Wordfence -> Firewall -> Blocking might be the place to check.

I tried installing Wordfence, but out of the box it does not appear to block FV Player editor saving.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello mabdellahi,

I was not able to reproduce this issue, at least not yet.

Please post an example of one of your video URLs. You can change the domain and file name, but I would like to double check that it’s not something like:

[video src="https://streaming-host:8080/video.mp4" /]

In last FV Player we had to limit the ports which we allow for the video check due to some security concerns. So maybe we need to improve that.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello mabdellahi,

Do you mean that the duration of the video no longer appears in the player control bar before the video is played?

Are you uploading MP4 videos into WordPress Media Library?

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Medalofhonor,

I see this was caused by us releasing a new FV Player version without really marking it as a new release on www.ads-software.com.

We occasionally do that when we need to push an update to fix some rare bug for one of our users. When that happens we give the user an alternative download link.

In this case we only needed to update the “Tested up to” tag in readme.txt and by updating that our version with the fix got public.

That’s the reason why Wordfence reports the change in the code.

Please just reinstall FV Player to get rid of that false warning.

Thanks,
Martin