FluentPlayer First Look Video Overviews 🎬 ▶

Blaine Moore We will take a look into mux.

Shahjahan Jewel Thanks, I switched to them last Fall and am loving them.

They are very developer friendly; you can get started for free (up to 10 videos and 100,000 streaming minutes without a card, or up to $20 free credit if you have payment credentials on hand), and if you are pay-as-you-go, they give you $100 credit for a $10/mo cost (though looks like that might be $20/mo now, just checking their site?). I moved over 65,000 minutes of content over to them with a simple script from Vimeo over the course of a weekend, and for context that's about $90/mo of usage for my site.

Their documentation for their API is also really detailed.

Blaine Moore Awesome. Let me see if we can push it and release in the first release. Looks solid.

Blaine Moore are they cheaper than bunny.net?

Sophia S Yes. They make their money on enterprise accounts (Time Warner-size companies.) Their blog is really interesting and worth perusing.

You can signup for a free account, and upload up to 10 videos that get up to 100,000 minutes viewed per month. Or, if you add a credit card (but still on the free level), they'll give you $20 of pay-as-you-go credit to use per month.

As I mentioned above, I have over 65,000 minutes of content uploaded to them, and that comes out to a monthly "bill" of about $94-$96 per month (I'm on a $10 per month plan, which gives me $100 of pay-as-you-go credit.)

So, right now I'm expecting to pay $120 per year for a much better product than what I had with Vimeo (who was about to raise my annual bill by 50% last Fall when I decided to pull the trigger and switch.)

I looked into Bunny.net, but for the amount of content I had it was going to cost me almost as much as it would at Vimeo, so I was pretty happy to discover Mux.

Some of the things that I like that are built right in:

• Upload the file, can create both public and authenticed playback URLs
• Automatically reduces the cost of video storage for videos that haven't been watched over time (I think it's after 30 and then 90 days?)
• Can easily add chapters, captions, scrub previews, etc.
• Has really good cue point integrations which lets you do neat stuff like highlight where somebody is in a transcript, etc.
• Has really well integrated data tracking (which if implemented with FluentPlayer would be awesome because you'd have instant data right in WordPress, and long-term data in Mux, which if FluentPlayer wanted to could actually pull that data live. If somebody was willing to setup an account with them, they'd even be able to track non-Mux-hosted video data, though I don't think they have as much of a free tier for that if Mux isn't hosting it.)
• Their support is really good. A chat bot can point you right to relevant documentation and makes it easy to turn a conversation into a ticket, their support staff is very quick to respond (usually a few hours and I think the longest I went was a little over 24 hours on a weekend when I wasn't expecting a response for a couple days anyway), and their support is very knowledgable and able to answer pretty esoteric and technical questions.
• The API is really easy to work with. I have an automation that automatically records data about my videos to my spreadsheet when I upload or change anything (video title, duration, whether it has closed captions, playback ID, etc.)
• They also will add closed captions for free if you want when you upload your videos, though I generally already have them created through my editing process. (That said, I did have them add closed captions to all my videos I migrated that were older than 7 or 8 years old when I started creating subtitles for everything.)

Blaine Moore That sounds pretty good. I like Bunny.net, but I'm always open to explore potentially better solutions.

How well does their captioning work? I've been using MacWhisper with the Parakeet model and am pretty pleased with the results. Can you teach it how to spell certain words?

William Beem It doesn't have a lot of options; basically, create them, or don't. I am (currently) doing my editing in Descript, so I correct my transcripts (and the subtitles) from there. You can download the subtitles that Mux creates automatically and clean them up further if needed. (Pretty sure I saw a blog post showing how to build an automation that does that, and diarizes the file for you, but that's using a third party tool.)

They use OpenAI's Whisper model, so it'd be similar to what MacWhisper does if you used that instead of Parakeet.

You can see how to add them (or download the VTT file and then replace them) here: https://www.mux.com/docs/guides/add-autogenerated-captions-and-use-transcripts#docs-root

I just did a quick search, and they actually do support transcription vocabularies! I haven't tried it yet, obviously, since I only used it to get a rough transcript on years of old videos that didn't already have one I had made manually, but you can read about that here: https://www.mux.com/docs/api-reference/video/transcription-vocabularies

Reading over that page, it may only apply to live streams, however; you'd have to experiment for auto generated captions of uploaded videos and/or reach out to their help desk.

I prefer to do all my editing ahead of time, though, and like being able to get a VTT with just the spoken content and an MD file with everything well formatted into paragraphs with chapter headings and diarization and some basic formatting. I'm planning to write a script that'll automatically match the formatted transcript with the subtitles to get phrase-level cuepoints along w/the formatting that loads at the browser level so I don't have to store all that extra data in my WordPress database (though it may end up involving creating the file and then attaching it as a separate track to the video; I haven't played around with that yet.)

Blaine Moore If you have hundreds of videos on Vimeo, how do I get them across to Mux without uploading every single one by hand? The only satisfying service I have encountered thus far is swarmify.com.

Helmar Rudolph I had a Vimeo Pro account, so that gave me access to the API. I just wrote a couple of small scripts to do it for me; the first one used the Vimeo API to generate a list of all of my videos and a download link for each one (plus title, etc.) Then the second script went and created a video in Mux and provided the information from the spreadsheet (Vimeo ID as the external ID, the video title, the download link, etc.) If it was a video I had a manually generated transcript for, then I also mapped those links to the Mux videos and had it download them off of my website, and if I didn't have a transcript ready to go had it generate the subtitles automatically.

Note that Mux does have an app called Truckload that will move things over for you, but I had to get a beta version from the developers that would work with Vimeo (this was late Summer/early Fall last year) but I couldn't get their app to work, and I wanted to get that done before Vimeo rebilled on me. So, that's why I wrote my own scripts. Looks like they've publicly released the Vimeo importer now, you can find a hosted version here: https://migrate.mux.dev/ (they also have the source code available if you want to run it locally - github link in the bottom right.)

Pierre-Marie ACHART You can signup here: https://fluentplayer.com/

Shahjahan Jewel yeah i typed that in, guessing the website was ready. just signed up.
also, i watched David's video and I can say i'm impressed.
It's only starting out and its already better than the Sure thing.
I mean it will have aspect ratio right on release... the Sure thing had us wait for two years to implement that, and support had us use an ugly JS hack. lol.

Gonzalo Cayo Bejarano That's a internal product we are using for last several months. let's see if we can release it publicly.

Morten Larsen Noted.

Shahjahan Jewel +1 for multilanguage cc 🙏

Alexis Iroha End of this month.

Shahjahan Jewel awesome

Peter Fallenius Bricks element would be a banger

Peter Fallenius Bricks! ❤️

Dominic Osborne Yes, from day one.

Ah, I see in one of the vids that Bunny and Stream are supported 😍

David Badilla Salazar woow, this is a great one indeed 🤗 cc Shahjahan Jewel 

David Badilla Salazar +1

David Badilla Salazar +1 what a great idea!!

Would love to test this by the way 😀

La Tribu Diving It's currently in the kitchen :)

I used the alpha version a couple of months ago, and re-tried this beta (which is, honestly, awesome).

So I picked up my favourite marketing use cases (with a geeky point of view) to share soon.

I'm waiting, if possible, for confirmation from the dev team about the Multilingual feature and how advanced it is in this beta ( I had some issues uploading files). Because in this era of AI, I see it as an amazing multi-market tool.

Just imagine: you can record your apnea or scuba diving courses in Spanish, and dub your entire online school in just a couple of clicks. Welcome to the international market :)

This is already implemented, but there were some bugs with caption uploads. So I want to check this deeply before recording. Specially, because depending on how advanced this is (and the dev docs), we can do this at scale. Or just for marketing teasers.

That said: you can count on a video before the official launch for sure!

Jorge de los Reyes Wow, that sounds great! In my case, I can't record the diving courses because I'm an official PADI center, so I use their e-learning platform. I use Fluentcommunity as a completely free members' area, but I'm sure I'll find some use for it. Thanks for all the work you do; you just need to convince the Ninjas to create a Spanish-speaking space :-)

La Tribu Diving Oh! Sure, PADI 😅 I've actually been a student on the platform myself, so building a community around it sounds like a great move: congrats!

About a Spanish community: that would be cool, but honestly I think an AI translation layer would make more sense than separate language communities. That said, it's probably expensive, so the team would need to see clear ROI first.

My bet: we won't see other languages unless it's AI-powered.

Same!
I was going to ask that and saw your comment :)

Peter Fallenius About two weeks, per comment on another thread.