Changing Video Player or How to activate Video Ads?

  • Xio
    • 6 posts
    September 11, 2019 1:44 PM EDT

    Hello,

    I have been managing my own little community with SocialEngine PHP and we are running into a technical problem at the moment. Do you know if there is any way to change the video player to JS, Flow player, Fluid Player or absolutely anything else relatively easily?

    We are heavily working with our Ad network to activate instream video ads but the function doesn't seem to be compatible with the current video player of SocialEngine. There seems to be also no 3rd party at the moment offering this as plugin/service.

    So my question is would you have a tutorial either:

    1) Helping us replace the original video player of SocialEngine with something else? 

    or

    2) Is it actually possible to have instream videos play with SocialEngine 4.10.4?

     

    Thank you!


    This post was edited by Xio at September 11, 2019 1:45 PM EDT
    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    September 12, 2019 6:48 AM EDT

    /externals/flowplayer shows we are using flowplayer. Based on the js file in that folder it is:

    Flowplayer v7.2.7 (Monday, 13. August 2018 08:40AM) | flowplayer.com/license

    Hope that helps.

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    September 12, 2019 6:50 AM EDT

    Or, did I perhaps misunderstand the question? I do see it calling flowplayer in several files. You can check this too by getting the free Sublime text and using it to search all files and folders for SEPHP that you have downloaded. Search for flowplayer and it'll show quite a lot of entries.

  • Xio
    • 6 posts
    September 12, 2019 10:23 AM EDT
    Hello Donna,

    After couple of hours of scratching my head yesterday , I found that SocialEngine is indeed using Flow Player. Somehow though my version doesn’t match with the number you have? Ours say 3.7.2 and all the licensing say 2011?

    Ideally we would like to remove Flow player completely and change it with any video player (free and open source would be better for our wallet
  • Xio
    • 6 posts
    September 12, 2019 12:04 PM EDT

    It actually says  "Flowplayer 3.2.13.min.JS", "Flowplayer 3.2.16.swf", and "Flowplayer 3.2.18.swf" Sorry for the confusion! 

    I seem to have 3 different FlowPlayer in that folder. So confusing.

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    September 13, 2019 9:38 AM EDT

    Perhaps you have plugins? I forgot to mention, if you are using the html5 setting, that wouldn't use flowplayer as it uses native html5. A third party expert who I asked said it would be a customization for you to have what you want for ads and stuff. I had asked SNS about it as they have an advanced video plugin.

  • Xio
    • 6 posts
    September 14, 2019 8:43 PM EDT

    Hello Donna,

    I was actually able to make a lot of progress on my own thanks to a call with JW player.  However, they have edited the compileHTML5Media() PHP function, but we are not seeing the changes take effect. it's still loading the same function. Is there some way to force the pages to use this updated code?

    I am also happy to share a tutorial on how to update Flowplayer to JW Player if anyone need it

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    September 16, 2019 8:29 AM EDT

    That's great that you are getting it to work for the most part. Do you have the site in development mode? If not, try that. If so, try disabling it and manually clearing cache and see if that helps. Also, clearing browser cache might help. I'm not 100% sure why it isn't updating.

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    November 22, 2019 7:30 AM EST

    We are updating our flowplayer version to better support html5 in 4.11 once that is released.

  • Xio
    • 6 posts
    November 24, 2019 11:54 AM EST
    Hello Donna,

    You are unfortunate too late for this. Couple of months ago we made a business deal with a developer. He kindly accepted to look at this for free. Fast Forward to today, he is now our Video and Media Developer. He was able to swap the video player and replace it with a custom player that plays in airplay and chrome cast , advertisement support and different video quality version.

    However allow me to use this post to complain. I love the work that we are creating thanks to your CMS and thank to you I am now running a moderately successful business. It took lots of years, personal hours of QA and lots of custom work. We never realised that we would need to pay to save this customisations work. Each major update to social engine is so expensive now for our installatio! They cost more than we payed for the original PHP license 2 years ago and that’s the full plan with all the add-ons.

    We don’t have the choice though as just updating the CMS would get rid of all our work and of course we have to comply with your security update. It really feels like we are paying a some sort of yearly subscription service even though we paid a lot for a PHP licence in a first place....