SmartVideo – Video Player and CDN

2.4.4

• Fixed SmartVideos disappearing from pages after they were saved
  • WordPress strips out HTML it doesn’t recognise whenever someone without full editing permissions saves a page, and it was removing the SmartVideo from the saved copy. A single save could take out a whole batch of pages at once, and the video stopped playing for your visitors. WordPress now leaves the video in place when the page is saved.
• Pages that already lost their video are playing again
  • Nothing was ever really lost: every setting for the video survived in the saved page, so SmartVideo now rebuilds the player from those settings when the page is displayed. Affected pages started working the moment you updated – there’s nothing to edit or re-save.
• The block editor stops reporting those pages as broken
  • Affected pages no longer show “This block contains unexpected or invalid content” with an “Attempt Recovery” button. The editor now reads the video’s settings straight from the saved page, and the next time you save that page as you normally would, the video is written back into it. SmartVideo never rewrites your saved pages on its own.
• Stopped publishing the underlying file address for SmartVideo-hosted videos
  • Video structured data for an embed added by its swarmify:// link included the directly playable file address – the very thing a swarmify:// link exists to keep out of your page’s source. Videos added that way no longer publish video structured data.

2.4.3

• Fixed the SmartVideo block showing an empty space in the block editor. Current WordPress versions draw the editor preview inside a frame of its own, and the player wasn’t loading there, so the block looked blank while you were editing it. Published pages were never affected — they played normally throughout. The preview now shows the real player again.

2.4.2

• Fixed vertical videos still rendering widescreen on embeds added before 2.4.1
  • 2.4.1 corrected new embeds only, because the block editor stores the widescreen shape in the saved block and never revisits it. SmartVideo now corrects that shape when the page is displayed, so switching an embed’s link to the youtube.com/shorts/… form is enough — you no longer have to remove and re-add the block. Nothing in your saved pages is changed.
• Removed the [smartvideo] shortcode’s raw data-swarm-setup attribute
  • WordPress ends a shortcode at the first ], so a real player configuration written there was cut off partway — which could stop the video playing, leave stray text on the page, or add bad entries to your video structured data. Use the shortcode’s own overlay_* attributes for call-to-action overlays. Setting data-swarm-setup on a hand-written <smartvideo> tag is unaffected and works as before.
• Housekeeping
  • The player script no longer loads on classic editor screens in the admin, where it was never used.
  • Fixed deprecation notices on sites running PHP 8.4.

2.4.1

• Vertical videos keep their true shape. YouTube Shorts and other vertical or 4:3 embeds now render at their real aspect ratio instead of being squeezed into a widescreen 16:9 frame. Embeds added with a youtube.com/shorts/… link pick this up automatically; if a vertical video still shows widescreen after updating, remove that embed block and paste the Shorts link in fresh.

2.4.0

• New player, ready when you are
  • A new, faster player is now available — and entirely opt-in. Your site keeps playing videos on the classic player when you update, so playback stays exactly as it is today. When you’re ready, switch under Player → Version in the SmartVideo settings — Legacy is the classic player, Stable is the new one, and Beta previews what’s next. A later release will make the new player the default.
  • While you stay on the classic player, the new player-only controls appear disabled with a “Legacy player” note. Any values you set are kept and start applying when you switch.
• New appearance controls (new player)
  • Secondary color, glass tint, corner radius, and a separate play-button corner radius
  • Watermark opacity and position
• New playback and behavior controls (new player)
  • Keyboard shortcuts, with an adjustable arrow-key seek step and individual toggles for mute, fullscreen, number-key jumps, and captions
  • Google Analytics events — optional playback events at a reporting interval you choose
  • Lazy-load player toggle
  • Some player features vary by Swarmify plan; the settings page shows what applies to yours
• Per-video call-to-action overlay
  • Add a clickable overlay with your own text and link to individual videos. Available in the block editor and the [smartvideo] shortcode for now — support in the other page builders comes in a later release.
• Breakdance builder support
  • Native SmartVideo element for Breakdance, joining Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Bricks, and Divi
• Fixes
  • Fixed the “iFrame player” setting having no effect on Vimeo embeds on the new player
  • Fixed “Could not save settings” appearing after resetting a settings section
  • YouTube start times (?t=/?start=) are now preserved in the block editor too
  • The settings status panel now checks the exact player file your site loads, so it can no longer report OK while the player is blocked
  • Fixed SmartVideo elements collapsing to nothing on Bricks 2.x pages
  • Removed a harmless but noisy missing-file error on every Divi 4 page
  • Fixed videos never loading on sites with WP-Optimize’s “Delay JavaScript” feature enabled
• Notes
  • The poster-first fast-load mode built for this release ships disabled — it depends on player-side support that lands in an upcoming player release, and will be switched on in a later plugin update
  • Tested with WordPress 7.0.2

2.3.3

• Fixed uploads failing on hosts where the wp-content folder is not writable
  • On managed hosts that keep the plugin folder read-only, every media upload since 2.3.0 stopped with “Upload service unavailable”. Uploads now fall back to your uploads folder.
• Fixed large uploads being saved damaged when another plugin also manages uploads
  • If a second upload or media plugin set its own transfer size, the pieces of the file were reassembled in the wrong places and the finished file was unusable, with no error shown. The pieces are now placed using the size actually sent.
• Fixed YouTube links that stopped working after 2.3.0
  • Saved links that were not in the most common form, such as those starting with “//”, with capital letters in the address, with extra spaces, or from a channel-specific address, were no longer recognized and the video did not play.
• Fixed being unable to add Swarmify-hosted videos in the classic editor
  • The “Add SmartVideo” window rejected swarmify:// addresses as invalid, even though they are the plugin’s own format.
• Fixed slow pages on sites that block outside connections
  • Where a Vimeo thumbnail could not be fetched, every page view retried and waited. The result is now remembered briefly.
• Fixed “Reset advanced settings” undoing the 2.3.1 video repair
  • On a site repaired by 2.3.1 or 2.3.2, resetting that section could switch conditional loading back on and blank the videos again. Reset now leaves that setting alone.