The player - Plugixa Video

Every video on your site plays in the same player, whether it is an HLS stream, an MP4 file, or a YouTube or Vimeo link. It appears on each video’s own page, and wherever you place it with the [pvx_video] shortcode, the Plugixa Video block or the Elementor widget.

What viewers see

The control bar sits along the bottom of the video:

Subtitles and their controls are part of Pro. See Subtitles and transcript.

While a video plays, the controls hide after 2.5 seconds without mouse movement, and come back as soon as the pointer moves or the player gets keyboard focus.

The Settings menu

The Settings button opens a menu with a group for each thing the viewer can change. A group only appears when there is a choice to make.

Quality: automatic and by hand

An HLS video plays in Auto quality by default: the player picks the quality the connection can carry, and never one larger than the player is on screen. The viewer can choose a quality by hand in the menu, and the switch happens at the next piece of video, without a pause. Choosing Auto again goes back to automatic.

The Quality group only appears when the video has more than one quality, so an MP4 file has none. In Safari and on iPhone and iPad, HLS plays through the browser’s own engine, which chooses the quality itself, and the menu has no Quality group there.

Keyboard shortcuts

The shortcuts work while the player has focus: click it, or reach it with the Tab key.

Shortcuts are ignored while Ctrl, Cmd or Alt is held, so browser shortcuts keep working, and while the timeline or volume slider has focus, where the arrow keys move the slider.

Picture-in-picture and full screen

Picture-in-picture moves the video into a small floating window, so the viewer can keep watching while scrolling the page or using another tab. The button only shows in browsers that offer it.

Full screen fills the screen with the whole player, controls included. On iPhone, where a web page cannot take over the screen, the video itself goes full screen with the phone’s own controls.

Touch screens

On a phone or tablet, a tap on the picture plays or pauses. Videos play inside the page instead of jumping to the phone’s full-screen player. On narrow screens the volume slider is hidden: use the Mute button or the device’s volume buttons.

Resume where you left off

For viewers who are signed in, the player remembers where they stopped, and the next time they open the video it starts from there, on any device, with the note “Resumed where you left off”.

The position is saved every 15 seconds of playback, when the viewer pauses, when the video ends and when they leave the page. The player starts from the beginning instead when:

• they stopped in the first 5 seconds;
• they stopped in the last 10 seconds;
• they watched at least 95% of it, which counts as finished.

Turn it off with Resume videos where signed-in viewers left off in Settings -> General -> Player. It is on by default. Guests have no saved position. The same saved positions fill Continue watching in the member library.

A link to a moment, such as https://example.com/video/sintel/?t=120, starts at that second instead, whatever was saved. With several players on one page, the link applies to the first.

YouTube and Vimeo videos

A YouTube or Vimeo video first shows its poster and a play button, and nothing is loaded from YouTube or Vimeo until the viewer clicks it. Then their own player opens in place, with their controls: the menu, shortcuts, subtitles and chapters above belong to the plugin’s player and apply to HLS and MP4 videos. YouTube videos load from youtube-nocookie.com, and Vimeo videos with Do Not Track. See YouTube and Vimeo.

Autoplay

A player placed with autoplay="true", or with Autoplay switched on in the block or Elementor widget, starts on its own once it loads:

[pvx_video id="706" autoplay="true"]

Browsers decide whether that is allowed, and most refuse to start a video with sound before the viewer has interacted with the site. The player does not mute the video to force it, so in that case it simply waits for a click. A YouTube or Vimeo video with autoplay loads its player straight away instead of waiting for the click.

When a video cannot be played

A viewer without access sees the poster with a message instead of the controls:

Who may watch what is set per video. See Access control.

Light on your pages

• The player’s script and styles load only on pages that show a video or one of the plugin’s pages. Other pages of your site load nothing from it.
• The HLS engine is a separate file, downloaded only for an HLS video.
• A player further down the page starts loading when it comes near the screen, so a page with many videos does not load them all at once.
• The player’s box has its final size before any script runs: 16:9, and at full width never taller than the screen. Nothing on the page moves when the video appears.
• The page never contains the video’s address. The player asks your server for it, which checks access first, so a cached page cannot give away a members video.

How wide the player renders in your theme is set in Appearance. For every way to place it, see Shortcodes, Blocks and Elementor widgets.