Platform Integration (OVP)

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Introduction

The platform integration plugin abstracts several aspects of dealing with the Flowplayer platform to make it easy to integrate the videos and players you have created with your development chain.

OVP stands for Online Video Platform and refers to the Flowplayer platform.

Table of contents

Manual Javascript setups

Include the plugin next to the core player:

<script src="//cdn.flowplayer.com/releases/native/3/stable/flowplayer.min.js"></script>
<!-- load HLS plugin as platform videos default to HLS -->
<script src="//cdn.flowplayer.com/releases/native/3/stable/plugins/hls.min.js"></script>
<script src="//cdn.flowplayer.com/releases/native/3/stable/plugins/ovp.min.js"></script>
<!-- load additional plugins if needed
<script src="//imasdk.googleapis.com/js/sdkloader/ima3.js"></script>
<script src="//cdn.flowplayer.com/releases/native/3/stable/plugins/ads.min.js"></script>
-->

Since the platform uses HLS streams as the primary source, you also need to load the HLS plugin.

Player and plugins exist in different release versions. Please see the release channel documentation.

OVP managed player

The managed async Javascript and iferame players integrated the OVP loader,a separate configuration is not required.

Media Id Based Sources

The OVP plugin is a loader plugin, which means that it loads a particular src type that is otherwise not supported in the native HTMLVideoElement. Specifically this plugin allows you to use a media_id from your Platform account with the Native player.

Media Ids can be retrieved through the platform API or from the url of a specific video page in the platform, the format is https://app.flowplayer.com/videos/<media_id>

flowplayer(container,
  { token : "keyboardcat"
  , src   : "<media_id>"
  })

This also works for playlist ids in Javscript embeds using the playlist plugin

Composite Media Id & Player Id Sources

In addition to allowing you to use the platform media_ids, the plugin can perform automerging of a Platform player design with a media source inline, reducing the total number of API calls so your video player can start playback as soon as possible.

You can get your player_id from the player design url https://app.flowplayer.com/players/<player_id>.

flowplayer(container,
  { token : "keyboardcat"
  , src   : "<player_id>/<media_id>"
  })

If your player design includes an ad schedule, it will be applied to your manual embed if you also load the ad plugin and the IMA3 SDK (see ad plugin docs).

Recommendations

The OVP plugin retrieves recommended videos based on the loaded video. When a list of videos is available recommendationsready event is emitted. Enable recommendations with recommendations option.

flowplayer(container,
  { token               : "keyboardcat"
  , src                 : "<player_id>/<media_id>"
  , recommendations     : true
  })

Other Benefits

This allows a mixing of managing configuration via the Platform so that non-technical team members can easily configure players and the ability to built deep integrations on top of our Platform.

We can also be sure to maximize performance by reducing the number of API calls and batching requests into composite responses without you needing to worry about both maintaining your integration, an integration with our API, and performance integrations yourself.

If you intend to use platform videos (hosted by us or remote video assets) with the manual Javascript setup, loading the platform integration plugin is mandatory to get analytics data.

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