You wait ages for a bus, then 3 come along at once. Today we’re releasing a trio of new features that we think you’ll like… very much.

Embeddable Player Customization

embed-advanced-optionsWe know that our users like embeds – a lot. More than 5,000 WorldTV channels are embedded on other websites and those pesky players get a workout of 5 million views a month. We’ve had to add 2 new servers to cope with all the pressure, and employ a small army of people with wet handkerchiefs to cool them down. Well maybe not the last part.

One of our most requested new features is to add greater customization options to the embedded players. Well starting today, live right now, no need to wait, you will see a new button within the Editor Widget section called ‘Advanced’. This new button reveals the following new features…

  • Customize the background colour of your player widget
  • Customize the foreground colour (the player controls)
  • Display a frame from the 1st video in your playlist

There’s a couple of caveats. You will need to click ‘Preview’ in the Editor to preview the player properly and it currently takes quite a long time for the video frame to display at high quality (possibly several hours). This will be improved shortly but we wanted to get this out to you asap.

Improved Drag & Drop

Have you ever been frustrated with the moving of clips within the playlist? We have been and it’s been on our ‘bugging us’ list for way longer than we’d care to admit. It’s hard to describe and only regular users will notice the difference but you should find moving clips around within the Playlist much easier from now on.

YouTube Problem Solver

youtube-problem-solverSince we added support for the official YouTube player there are times when videos you would like to add to your channel are not allowed. A common reason is that the video on YouTube has been disabled for embedding or for copyright violations. Since many of you had videos from before the official YouTube player arrived and to help troubleshoot problems that can occur in future, we have added something that we call the YouTube Problem Solver.

Basically this does what it says on the tin and lets you diagnose any issues you may have with YouTube videos that aren’t playing in your channel. You will get a small notification (an orange exclamation mark) that lets you view information about the video, visit the original page on YouTube to see the reason why it’s no longer available, and even search again for similar videos. It’s a great way to clean up your YouTube video collection.

Other bug fixes and improvements

  • We now offer ‘channels’ support for Daily Motion – add multiple clips using a Daily Motion channel URL
  • Fixed an issue with the next/previous buttons on embeddable players
  • Fixed an issue where sometimes the video would start on an embedded player before the animation had finished loading (classic skin)
  • Fixed an issue where sometimes the 2nd video clip in a playlist would not play on embedded players if it was a YouTube clip
  • Fixed the search functionality for Google Videos. Google Videos now add correctly.