Playlists are one of the key features of the FV Player and we simply love them. We've built many additional features around them and we're happy to announce another one - a multifunctional repeat/shuffle button!   

Repeat or Shuffle in just one click!

This simple little button hides more than you would expect. It allows you to choose whether you want to play all videos and stop at the end of the playlist, repeat the current video, repeat the whole playlist or shuffle between all videos from that same playlist.

Try it here

You can try the repeat button feature here in our demo playlist:

[This post contains video, click to play]

Where to find it

To turn on the Playlist Repeat button feature simply go to:

WP Admin back-end -> Settings -> FV Player Pro -> Sitewide FV Player defaults and there you can turn on the Repeat Button

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New playlist repeat button

Post from: Foliovision

It's been a long time since we announced a feature called AB looping. Although it may sound simple at the beginning, our users have shown us that the possibilities are enormous.

AB Loops actually represents a huge step in FV Player development. Thanks to this feature, we've encountered a new market - an online education.

And the more we work with online education businesses, the more we trust they are the absolute future of education.

Sharing Looping is caring

As time went by there were more and more users using this feature on their website. For some of them looping was even the key feature.

You can read our LearningGuitarNow case study if you want to read a story of a successful musician who used our FV Player AB Looping to enormously boost his online video education business. 

Time to change

Nothing lasts forever. And that's the reason why we decided to completely redesign the look of AB Loop controlbar, although the old design was still on point.

On the other hand, technical background of it was a bit outdated and some of our users have been running into some technical issues caused by the way our AB Loop controlbar used to work.

You can try the new updated design in this demo video.

[This post contains video, click to play]

As you can see in the demo video. The changed design makes no change in the way our AB Loop feature works. It's still super convenient and easy to use. The the i and o key-shortcuts are still working just the same as they used to.

Let us know in the comments how you like the new design!

The new updated AB Loop appearance is part of the 7.3.16.727.beta version!
It will appear in nearest Release update let along other updated features.

If you want to switch your FV Player to Beta you can follow this Switching FV Player Pro to Beta guide. 

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New AB Loop appearance update

Post from: Foliovision

We love to communicate and share ideas with our users. Thanks to that, our inbox is always filled with interesting feature requests and resourceful ideas.

One day a feature request about Chromecast arrived and since our main goal with FV Player is to always listen to our customers' needs, the decision was easy.

Chromecast is now supported by both Free and Paid version of the FV Player!

What's the Chromecast?

Chromecast is a handy casting solution developed by Google. It comes in form of an adapter that allows you to cast media from your mobile devices on any screen with HDMI connector via your Wi-Fi.

Free vs Pro. What's the difference?

As I said earlier, Chromecast feature is now supported by both versions of the FV Player. The difference is that the Free version relies completely on the Flowplayer (the core video technology behind FV Player) which unfortunately has a lot of bugs at this stage of development.

For example, with Free plugin yo can run Chromecast for only one player on each page. It also loads JScript library for each player separately which can slow down your website a little.

We've fixed most of these bugs and submitted the fix to the Flowplayer development team. You can check it at the Open Flowplayer issues fixed by Foliovision in Flowplayer's GitHub.

Until Flowplayer development team accepts this we've decided to keep the fix for Pro version only.

In the case, you already own a Chromecast adapter you can try it right away on this video.

Just make sure the adapter and your device is connected to the same network and hit the Chromecast button.

[This post contains video, click to play]

You can find more information about the Chromecast feature with complete set-up guide in our "Using FV Player with Chromecast" documentation.

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New Chromecast feature

Post from: Foliovision

Internet is a world-wide thing and world is filled with people speaking many different languages. One of the hardest things with online video is to make it available for as wide range of people as possible. Subtitles is an important thing in the world of online video and for many people they're enough. But we've recently decided to go further and improve it even more.

So, we are happy to introduce you a multiple audio tracks feature for the FV Player!

Single video, multiple audio tracks

It may look simple, but it hides a huge number of possibilities. You can have multiple voice lines in different languages for single video. Or you can have a native video audio track in one and detailed commentary in another to explain video's topic and background more closely to your users.

As we said earlier, the possibilities are completely in your hands. We're really thrilled to see what our users will do with this feature. 

You can try it in this demo:

Simply hit the Audio button and choose desired audio track.

[This post contains video, click to play]

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better ever single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New multiple audio tracks support

Post from: Foliovision

Have you ever spent several minutes just by taking screenshots and uploading them to your site to make a simple thumbnail?

Save yourself a couple of minutes per each video and use our new built-in screenshot thumbnail generator with the new FV Player version 7.3.18.727!

Where to find it

This feature is part of our FV Player editor.

You can find our FV Player editor either in your posts or by clicking at the video id in your FV Player video database at: WP Admin Dashboard -> FV Player button in the side-bar.

Once you're in the video editor hit the Play button on your video preview.

Then find the desired spot in the video and hit the Screenshot button.

The screenshot will automatically upload to your WordPress library and the Splash image field will automatically update.

Hit the Update button to confirm the changes.

This feature requires enabled CORS headers. That means it will automatically work for HLS and Vimeo videos but you need to manually set your CORS headers for .mp4 videos.

Also please be aware of the fact that this feature won't work for YouTube videos because of YouTube's limited API.

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New built-in video screenshot thumbnail generator

Post from: Foliovision

Choosing a Cloud Hosting to store all your videos on and stream them to your website may seem like an easy-to-do thing but the reality is often a totally different story.

Many Cloud hosting providers don't want you to stream your videos stored on their clouds to your website and they will put as many obstacles to your way as they can.

We've published many articles about cloud storage services available for video hosting. However, this time we will show you the ones that you should avoid at any cost.

What are the obstacles?

Are you asking what are the obstacles that Cloud hosting providers can possibly put in your way?

There are actually several of them and the most used is bandwidth limitation. As we all know streaming a video takes a slightly higher amount of bandwidth then sharing any other media because of the big sizes of video files.

So, the easiest way to prevent you from streaming videos from the cloud is to simply set your bandwidth low enough.

The next obstacle that you'll often see is a live resetting of source URLs. To share and stream any video, you need a source URL for your player to load and play it. So, the next easy way to prevent you from doing it is to simply reset your source URLs once a while. Some cloud services reset them once a week, some even more often than that.

This, of course, won't completely prevent you from streaming videos, but it will annoy you so much over the time that you'll stop doing it by yourself.

The third and most interesting one by our opinion is implementing a built-in player into the cloud and not letting you stream it with any other player. Some cloud hosting services uses custom source URLs that will automatically redirect you to their page where they will play you the video with their own built-in player completely blocking you from embedding any video to your website.

Which are the Services?

Here's a list of some of the biggest Cloud Hosting services which won't allow you to stream video from their clouds:

Google Drive

Google Drive won't completely block you from streaming videos to your website but the way they allow you to do it is so crippled that you would rather use any other service than fight with Google Drive.

You have to change privacy settings to "public for everyone" each video separately with Google Drive. But he most importantly you have to replace part of the source URLs by hand for every video which is really inconvenient and time-consuming. There are also other technical limitations like limited video resolution max to 1080p or necessity for player to load the whole video file first and then play it.

One Drive

One Drive uses the built-in video player and custom redirection URLs to prevent you from streaming video. That means every video stored on One Drive is locked from embedding to any other website than their own dedicated one. We've searched for ways to break it, without any success.

DROPBOX

With Dropbox, the situation is very similar to Google Drive. It is possible to stream video from Dropbox but there are so many limitations. You need to replace parts of the source URLs just like with Google Drive and the technical limitations are very similar as well. The bandwidth is low and the loading times are really long. Not a great choice for video hosting.

Adrive

On one hand ADrive is capable of image and video hosting but on the other hand, it is one of the weakest and least reliable choices for hosting any of your data. And of course, technical limitations won't allow you to stream any videos at all. But what is more, there are several privacy concerns added to that since ADrive reserves a full rights to inspect your data if it suspects for any reason. To be honest, we wouldn't recommend it at all.

So, which Cloud Hosting should I use?

There are many Cloud Hosting service that we have a great experience with. And choosing the right one really depends on your needs.

If you're not sure which hosting you should use check out our Video hosting documentation. We've tested most of the available hosting services and we're sure it will help you to decide.

Also, If there's any hosting service that you're interested in not covered in our documentation. Don't hesitate to ask us about it via our Forums!

Cloud Hosting Providers where videos cannot be stored for playback on your website: OneDrive, ADrive, Dropbox

Post from: Foliovision

It's been a long time since we've announced the video playback position remembering feature. Many of our users enjoy it and some of them even came up to us with request for this same feature for video playback speed.

Since we always try to listen to our customers, here it comes as part of the new FV Player 7.3.18.727 version!

Simple and clever

This feature can be really beneficial for e-learning sites. Imagine you're explaining something really difficult in a video lesson so your clients will choose to slow the playback speed down in order to understand every aspect of the video. Halfway into the course something interrupts him and he has to stop watching. With FV Player your clients can easily jump back into the video without need to tweak any settings because all of their position and speed data will be automatically restored.

How to turn on the remembering

To turn on the video speed remembering you don' have set up anything extra besides speed buttons. If you have the speed buttons turned on, the speed remembering will turn on automatically. You can turn on speed buttons at:

WP Admin dashboard -> Settings -> FV Player Pro -> Sitewide FV Player Defaults -> Speed buttons

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New remember video speed feature

Post from: Foliovision

New projects always bring new experience and new interesting views on our player and its features.

One of the most essential features of FV Player are our playlists. It may sound simple but we've developed so many features around them that they've turned out to be really complex today.

New styles

We're glad that we can introduce two new styles for our video playlists! Both of these playlist uses lightboxes to play videos in fulscreen.

You can see and try both of them below.

Season playlist style

[This post contains video, click to play]

The first and really interesting one is our new Season playlist style. We've developed it while we were working on the Afroland.tv website. This playlist uses a really simple vertical layout with ability to add a short custom descriptions under each video. You can write these descriptions into the new Synopsis field that you can find in FV Player editor under each video.

polaroid playlist style

[This post contains video, click to play]

The second one is really simple and good-looking Polaroid style. This style will separate your videos into a polaroid-like looking frames.

Let us know if you like the new playlist styles in the comments below!

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New Playlist Styles

Post from: Foliovision

Mobile devices have been leading the online world since the first iPhone came out and it looks like there's no reason for it to change.

When Google announced the AMP October 2015 many publisher knew it's the right time to redesign their websites and stick to the AMP framework. Although the controversy, the number of AMP-powered sites is constantly growing.

And that's the reason why we've decided to add support for AMP powered sites to our FV Player VAST. 

What's AMP

AMP which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source project developed by Google. It aims to standardize the frameworks used for mobile version of websites.

The AMP framework promises to optimize and speed up loading of static mobile web-pages.

According to Google statistics, AMP sites are loading 4 times faster and use 10 times less data than usual ones. Google also favorize AMP powered sites in Google search results on mobile devices.

There's also a lot of controversy going around AMP as well. Some web publishers believe that it's just another way extend Google's internet dominance and to lock them even more inside Google's ecosystem.

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, said:

"there is a sense in which AMP is a Google-built version of the web. We are moving from a world where you can put anything on your website to one where you can’t because Google says so."

So, wether you like AMP or not. FV Player and FV Player VAST is here for you, providing support for all the recent web standards.

How to turn it on

Turning on the support for AMP websites is really easy with FV Player VAST

Simply go to:

WP Admin Dashboard -> Settings -> FV Player VAST

and check the AMP support checkbox.

The limitation here is that you can only use a bare MP4 videos for VAST ads in AMP. That’s how the amp-ima-video element works, it requires a simple video type like that, while for example Vimeo is something else.

What FV Player Pro could do about it is to use the bare MP4 files from Vimeo, the so called Pro file URLs which you have available for the videos which you own. That would in turn make the video easier to download, but AMP is about making it easier to access your website content, it’s not for membership websites.

Unfortunately the AMP project only accepts the big players - either you embed a bare video file or you can use one of the big video providers - Vimeo, YouTube, Brightcove, Dailymotion and so on. There is no way for us to put in custom scripts.

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New AMP Support in FV VAST

Post from: Foliovision

Although we love to bring new features to the FV Player as often as possible there's also a plenty of space for us to update and optimize the old ones.

This time we've focused on the technical background of our player and made few small but very important changes in our player's HTML code. To pack this update up even more, we've decided to add few small design changes as well.

Check them out.

HTML changes

We've decided to switch from using CSS backgrounds to simple IMG for splash images on our player. There are several reason for doing that. The first and main one is the fact that this way it does support lazy load and loads faster than with CSS. It also allows us to add support for responsive images and retina.

Design changes

The second part of this update is focused on design changes. We've decided to change few things in design of our player and we think you'll like them. 

The first change that we've done is that we decided to move the Airplay button next to the fullscreen button. This way it is much less apparent and you'll less likely accidentally press it.

The second change is that we've changed the way how timeline and control buttons work when the video window is too narrow. With this new update the timeline will jump above the control buttons as you can see in the screenshot below. This way you're able to control all features no matter how narrow the video window is.

And the third and last change is that we've decided to group whole playlist(player and playlist items) into one single item in lightbox. This will help us to prevent collisions with styling on users websites.

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

[This post contains video, click to play]

New HTML mark-up and design changes

Post from: Foliovision

A while ago we were introducing our nice and convenient Amazon S3 Browser. Now the same thing is happening for the Vimeo - you can get links to your videos right there and you don't need to copy/past the URLs all the time.

Instant crush

It has been almost a year since we announced the S3 Browser. The reason for it was simple - AWS's interface is simply so inconvenient to use.

We have clients who use S3 to host up to hundreds of videos, imagine how incredibly time-consuming it would be to go through whole S3 bucket, just to find the desired video and copy it's path for FV Player. With the S3 Browser it's a matter of 5 clicks. You simply have to love it.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

The Vimeo video picker is even more powerful than the S3 Browser.

First and probably the most important is support for Search bar in Vimeo picker. That way you can get to the right video almost instantly. We would like to do this for S3 Browsers as well, but AWS S3 has no search feature. There would have to be a background cron job checking the S3 Bucket content and indexing it.

Next important feature of Vimeo picker is support for Vimeo albums. It's a way of categorizing your videos on Vimeo.

And of course the Vimeo picker also show the video thumbnail images. Since these are stored on Vimeo it's easy to just show them. We would like to do something similar for S3 Browser but since it has no search capabilities it's a real challenge.

As you can see on the screenshot above, the new template is now divided into two segments. First is the table of content on the left site containing all the videos and second is the video properties field on the right containing more close information about the desired video.

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New Vimeo picker

Post from: Foliovision

Autoplay is heavily used feature within FV Player users and we're glad to announce a simple but really useful update to it.

With this new update you can set the autoplay to "Muted". This way your users video will automatically start to play with muted sound.

This way the autoplay won't be so disruptive for your users.

Here's a demo video with Muted Autoplay turned on:

[This post contains video, click to play]

How to turn it on

With muted autoplay you have two different approaches to use it. You can either turn it on globally for your whole website at:

Settings -> FV Player Sitewide Defaults -> set Autoplay to Muted

Or you can turn it on individually per-player for each video at the FV Player editor in the Options tab

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New global and per-player muted autoplay feature

Post from: Foliovision

Using subtitles will always allow you to serve your videos to more audience. With the new update, it's more convenient than ever before.

With the new 7.4.6.727 update FV Player remembers not only video position but now it will remember your preferred language and it will automatically serve you subtitles in it.

How to turn it on

Unlike video position remembering which you need to set up manually, FV Player will remember your subtitles language automatically. You don't need to change any setting, just make sore that you're using the 7.4.6.727 version. This same rule applies for speed and sound volume.

Try it

You can easily try it here. Just pick any language and reload the page.

[This post contains video, click to play]

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New subtitles language remembering feature

Post from: Foliovision

We're really happy to announce you that the 7.4.8.727 update is out now. Besides other new features there's one really interesting and useful one. 

We've added contributor and author permissions into the FV Player editor.

How does it work?

It is really simple. In WordPress, you can natively sort users in your WordPress back-end into different roles. If you run a blog you're for sure familiar with Author and Contributor roles. These are the two we've decided to focus on.

Author role permissions

As author you can see posts written by other users but you can edit only those made by you. Same is with the videos in FV Player video database.

As you can see in the screenshot below, when you're logged in as an Author in your WordPress back-end you can see and edit only those videos which are embedded by you inside the FV Player video database.

Contributor role permissions

As contributor your role permissions are very much similar to the Author with the difference that you can't post any content publicly.

Everything that you decide to post have to be accepted by Administrator first.

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New Contributor and Author user permissions

Post from: Foliovision

Vimeo is great. It's a place to find wonderful videos from independent film markers, CGI artists or even action sport athletes.

It also provides a powerful video encoding and hosting service. However nothing is perfect and Vimeo is no exception - it sometimes has a downtime or perhaps suffers from a DDoS attack. Last time it happened was today at about 4 PM UTC. 

With our FV Player Pro we let you embed your Vimeo videos as we believe you should be able to present the videos on your website in the way that you like - without having to use the Vimeo iframe code. That way we can give you all the custom controls you need, add video transcript or make the videos much harder to download.

Sometimes a Vimeo video embedded with FV Player won't play. All you get is:

Then we get some complaints. But since we do monitor Vimeo servers we know when this happens its usually an error on the Vimeo side, unfortunately.

If you ever run into such issue, just try to open any video on Vimeo website and you might find there is no player at all:

In the above screenshot the player cannot be seen, as these "config" requests visible in the Network tab in the browser Developer Tools have failed. Something went wrong and https://player.vimeo.com stopped responding.

Or if you try to open the URL from the iframe embed code, you would just get:

Oops! That wasn't supposed to happen. Please try again in few minutes.

https://player.vimeo.com is very important as not only it's used for API calls from vimeo.com website, it's also used for the iframe embed codes and also for the Vimeo Pro File URLs - which let you use a third party player to play Vimeo videos.  

Another place to check is the Vimeo status page on vimeostatus.com. If it seems they do not know about the issue, just drop a line to VimeoStaff on Twitter. And of course, we are available in our support forums. 

History of Vimeo failures

Looking at that status page on vimeostatus.com it looks like there is a failure once per month:

Our Vimeo API check reports the same, but also a couple more 2 minute downtimes. These appear to caused by some connection issues between the Vimeo and our monitoring servers:

FV Player Pro and Vimeo failures

Post from: Foliovision

It's been a while since we've wrote our last feature announcement. However, great news are that we haven't eased up on our work on great new features for our player. Here's a list of all new interesting stuff that've been recently added to our player.

FV Player editor preview update

We have reworked and updated code that is behind video preview in our FV Player editor. New code is much lighter and faster and it also makes the feature more resilient.

iframe embedding

If there's anything that we like it is adding new useful small improvements into already working features. This time we've decided to improve our embed feature for playlists.

We've added little piece to the iframe code which tells our player which video from playlist was user watching when he pressed the embed button. This will force the player to play that particular video first and then to continue in the playlist original order.

This playlist originally begin with "Bratislava - A City Surrounded by Nature" video but we've embedded it to this page while this one.

Better 403 error detection for iOS

Many users are using signed URLs to secure their videos and unfortunately iOS does not react to the moment when signed URL expires, which results to 403 HTTP error.

We've built entire checking mechanism for iOS to detect such failures and allow FV Player Pro to get a fresh video URL. In the latest update we've made this mechanism much faster and more reliable.

subtitles lining improvements

FV Player now shows the first matching subtitle line when you turn subtitles on on any video. Before this update, FV Player used to wait until the next matching subtitles line comes up.

volume bar improvements

With the new update volume level can be dragged all the way to the left which will mute the sound and show mute icon instead of leaving the grey bar as it used to.

After clicking on the mute icon the volume will restore to its original level.

Bugfixes

Lightbox - We've fixed the sizing for mobile landscape view.

Duration scanning - We've fixed the video duration scanning within FV Player editor in free version of FV Player.

Video position saving - We've fixed a bug causing Video position saving feature not work on Chrome at version 80 or higher.

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

[This post contains video, click to play]

Reliability and usability fixes in FV Player

Post from: Foliovision

So you now have a website with all your videos encrypted with FV Player Pro using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elastic Transcoder or Coconut.co (full FV Player integration coming soon )? Or perhaps your video platform is Vimeo and you can just put up FV Player Vimeo Security and stop at least the known video download tools. Bravo!

Now you want to post some of your videos to Facebook. Are your videos protected from download there? Not really, not even in a private group. Using FV Player Pro with independent hosting is not really an option. Facebook doesn't play well with independently hosted videos, you really have to upload to their platform, which we don't control.

Here's some good strategies to minimise your risk.

One: Don't use YouTube embeds

Any video on YouTube and I mean any video is fair game for half a dozen great video download tools, most of them based on the open source youtube-dl code on Github. Running downloads from the command-line is not many people's idea of fun so there are a bunch of GUI front-ends for youtube-dl. Personally I use 4Kdownloader when I want to create a local copy of a video, including 4K.

4KDownloader interface

While cross-platform, on Mac OS 4kdownloader only works on Mac OS 10.13 and later. I use MacVideoRipper Pro on older systems. MVRP website appears to have disappeared from the internet: probably as it was using open source youtube-dl code without releasing their own source code. No honour among thieves! Firefox offers many browser-based YouTube download options.

Why would I download videos when I can just save them in playlists? YouTube has a nasty habit of – and it's getting worse – of just disappearing content. If you want access to a video for reference, either for a practical project, or for an article, you better take a copy.

On Facebook, any YouTube video which is embedded can be downloaded just as if it was posted on YouTube.

Two: Make sure to use Facebook's own tools

Facebook has learned that content creators don't take well to having their hand-rolled and expensive custom content widely shared without attribution. In the past, reporting the videos was the only option:

We understand how frustrating it can be to find your videos posted on someone else's Facebook Page without your permission. You've been able to report these videos if they violate your copyright. And now, you'll have an additional option to get credit when this happens, as a way to expand your audience.

Hand reporting videos wastes creators' time while individually investigating takedowns is a huge support burden for Facebook. To make their lives easier they've built some automated tools which amazingly enough improve the lives of creators. Instead of just taking down your videos, you can have them re-attributed to you and your business page.

Facebook calls this new system Rights Manager. Not everyone has access – you have to prove you are an original content creator. Imagine that some clever chap decided to upload Hollywood movie trailers before the studios did. Suddenly his "New Movies Reviews" Facebook page would be credited with every Star Wars and James Bond trailer uploaded on Facebook.

Facebook Rights Manager Ownership Panel

Once you have access to Rights Manager, you add every video with original content from your library. After that anyone who uses more than 30 seconds from your video will see that a credit to you beneath that video on his or her Facebook account.

If your pirate is clever and embeds videos via YouTube this probably won't work (Facebook wouldn't be scanning the YouTube videos) now but may in the future (it's technically possible). The other way for a video republisher to work around Rights Manager would be to reframe your video or add another element (their face reacting): these are called reaction videos.

But Rights Manager is a lot better than nothing. It will stop the semi-automated and lazy from easily republishing your videos for their own popularity and

What's especially good is

1. that the content creator doesn't have to work hard at enforcement
2. rather than creating direct conflict prompting the republisher to work around reporting or replace video, the content creator enjoys credit, exposure and traffic.

What Facebook have done to protect content creators is very clever. As a huge company with some very capable programmers and a closed platform, if Facebook wants to put a stop to something they have the talent and tools to do so.

Three: Partial Videos Only

I would not host full videos on Facebook. I'd be posting either shortened versions or Coles notes versions. Shortened versions means that if a video is fifteen minutes, I'd just post the first six minutes to Facebook. Coles notes versions means that if the videos is fifteen minutes, I'd post about three minutes of highlights.

To see the full video, the viewer must go to your own site where you control both copy protection and access. With FV Player Pro, encrypted HLS streams from AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elastic Transcoder or Coconut.co and FV Player Vimeo Security you can make it next to impossible to download your videos (nothing is impossible to a species who has put men on the moon: our measure of successful DRM/copy protection is that it would be easier to just screen capture the video than download it).

At this point, you can gate the video with an email signup or even with a social media gate. As a publisher, I'd certainly prefer the email signup to a like or a follow, but that's just me. Some sites would do better with a gate.

Or even just let the visitor watch the video uninterrupted and offer him or her a long list of other videos, both free and gated at the end.

****

PS. This article on how to protect your videos on Facebook from piracy is a work in progress. If you have some additional tips or practical experience with Facebook Rights Manager for instance, I would be very grateful if you could share it with us. We'll include your contribution in the main article, with attribution of course.

How to Protect Your Facebook Videos from Downloaders

Post from: Foliovision

As usually, we're super happy to announce new feature to our player. Even more when it's as important as this one and we know that many of our users will benefit from it in the future.

Multiple video playback

Couple of users turned to us with a wish for ability to play multiple videos on their websites at the same time. We're really happy to announce that this is now possible with the new 7.4.17.727 update.

To activate this feature all you need to do is to turn this feature on at:

Settings -> FV Player Pro -> Sitewide FV Player Defaults

With this feature you can play several videos at the same time. Only the last played video will remain audible and other videos will automatically mute your users don't need to manually mute anything, FV Player does it automatically for them.

You can try it with these two videos.

[This post contains video, click to play]

[This post contains video, click to play]

Stay tuned for more!

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better every single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates into it. You can actually help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

So if you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

Watch Multiple Videos Simultaneously with FV Player

Post from: Foliovision

We are very excited to announce an addition to our licensing system. From this week, there's a separate field for a dev site in every licensed account. It's been a nuisance for our developer users not to have the ability to add a pro license for the dev domain. We've normally added the dev domains manually on request but that's a been a waste of your time and burns our support resources too.

Historically licensed users have always been able to create dev sites on a subdomain of a license for example, https://staging.yourdomain.com or at any of any sub-domain on wpengine.com or getflywheel.com (often used for staging sites). Thanks to the kind prompting of Carlos Ascenio of GuitarRivva.com, the leading Spanish language guitar learning site, this long dreamt convenience (rather than essential) feature, the custom dev subdomain feature is now a reality.

Here's how it works. Head over to your license management page: https://foliovision.com/my-licenses

Click on the "Staging Domains" button:

FV Player My Licenses area

Under the main licensed domain, there's now an option to add a development domain:

Here's what My Licenses looks like after entering your staging domain:

You can now automatically download FV Player Pro from within FV Player on your subdomain.

We sometimes get questions about the licensing system: the easiest way to license is to add your domain at https://foliovision.com/my-licenses and then just to automatically download FV Player Pro from within FV Player. You do not need to copy and paste the license key yourself nor make any separate downloads and uploads to your site (except in rare cases of custom versions), it's all automatic, including the beta program. We've worked hard to make managing licenses easier than almost any other software.

Just add any fully-qualified subdomain and it's licensed for FV Player Pro like your main domain. The FV Player logo will occasionally show as this add-on license is for dev domains only.

Limitations

• You must have an active support and updates account to be able to add a dev site.
• One site per license for now. If you have a multi-site license, just assign one of your five or twenty domains to your agency domain – that will allow you unlimited staging sites on your agency or development domain.
• Subdomains only. Developers who keep their staging site on individual top-level domains should purchase a single add-on domain (renewal charges are very low for add-on domains). This should not affect many developers. If your agency already have a five site license but also keep dev top level domains running for some or most of those sites, get in touch with our support team and we'll make special arrangements for you.

I should probably thank the TheNewsletterPlugin as well. After reviewing their purchase/licensing procedures in detail and then scoring our own licensing system, I was determined to improve our licensing experience. I hope this helps all you other developers out there.

Dev Site – Staging Site Now Automatically Included with All Pro Licenses

Post from: Foliovision

A lot of our customers use and love the Scroll Autoplay feature. So far, this feature has only allowed videos to autoplay while scrolling down. However, some of our customers would like the autoplay to function in other cases as well. 

That is why we are happy to announce the new improvements to Scroll Autoplay, which let you allow autoplay when scrolling up. It also lets you autoplay other videos after one has been manually paused. 

From now on, scroll autoplay is available for mobile users too. 

How to enable autoplay when scrolling up  

Go to Settings -> FV Player and in the Setup page look for the Pro Features tab. As you can see in the picture below, there are now two autoplay settings: 

The first setting enables the Scroll Autoplay feature as is, making it function only when the video comes into viewpoint while scrolling down.

The new setting, allows it to happen while scrolling up as well. Apart from that, the new setting also allows other videos to autoplay after the user has paused one of them. 

scroll autoplay now avaliable for mobile

As of now, mobile users will also be able to experience scroll autoplay. The only exception are YouTube hosted videos played on iOS, as their API doesn't behave in a consistent way. Hopefully, we can fix this for the future iOS versions.

You can test these improvements in our Scroll Autoplay demo.

Stay tuned for more

We are trying to make our FV Player plugin better ever single day by bringing more and more upgrades and updates. You can help us a lot, by giving us feedback.

If you have any tips or questions, don't hesitate and contact us via our Forum!

New improvements to the Scroll Autoplay feature

Post from: Foliovision