Updates

Core Player

• Added more granular DASH and HLS playback error codes.
• Added specific error codes for cases where an attempt to start playback fails.
• Reduced player setup errors by extending the setup timeout from 30 to 60 seconds.
• Created a new warning event that displays messages in the developer console, alerting developers of non-fatal errors.. Note: Documentation updates about these changes are coming soon.
• Updated the name of the Chromecast button component from button to google-cast-launcher to reflect changes made by Google to be compatible with React.
• Added a new configuration option, displayPlaybackLabel, which adds click-to-play call to action text below the play icon on the idle screen. Testing has shown a 3-5% lift in clicks to play with this feature enabled. The default text is “Play” and it can be customized or translated in the intl block with the playback option.
• Added non-fatal, console-logged warning events and error codes. See our Errors Reference for updates.
• Added a new div, which wraps the player's existing DOM structure, in order to make way for upcoming features.

Localization
For more information on the release note below, please see the Configuration Reference and the support article on how to translate player text with automated player localization.

• Added support for players to automatically translate tooltips, ARIA labels, and headings into 14 different languages, based on the language attribute declared in the HTML tag on the page. If the lang attribute is not present, the viewer’s browser language will be used, and a translation will still be provided if available. For a full list of languages supported and to request support for another language, please see the support article.
• Introduced a new object, the intl block, which accepts an array of objects of ISO language codes. Each language object accepts all the localization strings previously used in localization. Going forward, developers are encouraged to use the intl block so that a single player can be used across pages localized in any language.
• Added 12 new localizable strings, which includes “link,” “auto,” “off” and more, as well as updated the default values for a few existing strings. All hard-coded strings are now mapped to localizable strings.
• Moved the following fields into the intl block so that they can be localized by language: abouttext, advertising.admessage, advertising.cuetext, advertising.loadingAd, advertising.podmessage, advertising.skipmessage, advertising.skiptext, related.autoplaymessage, sharing.heading. These fields will be backward compatible with their original locations, but will not take advantage of the automated player localization features for those fields. All fields should be nested in the intl block as written.
• Moved localization.related to related.heading within the intl block. In a localization context, related is now an object nested inside the intl block.

Advertising

• Removed the auto-exit fullscreen functionality when using IMA with skippable ads, now that iOS 12 allows the video element (and thus the skip button to) work in fullscreen instead of the native player.
• Decluttered the seek slider by removing cue markers for non-linear (banner overlay) ads.
• In the VAST plugin, added support for the following attributes in the ad tag wrapper:
  • fallbackOnNoAd – selects any stand-alone adwhen set to true and the response contains no ad.The default is false.
  • followAdditionalWrappers – ignores wrappers received in the response when set to false. The default is true.
  • allowMultipleAds – only allows stand alone adswhen set to false. The default is true.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue where VP9 streams would not play in Edge.
• Fixed a bug causing the player to error when it was set up after zone.js, a third-party script.
• Eliminated a javascript exception thrown when failing to load the player bidding script.
• Fixed an issue where it was difficult to differentiate between the text decoration of selected and hover states for items in the settings menu, causing confusion about which option was selected.
• Fixed an issue present in IE 11 on Windows 7 where viewers were unable to mute HLS content with the Flash provider.
• Fixed an issue causing some 608/708 captions from HLS streams to render successfully.
• Fixed an issue causing an expired license key error on mobile devices in rare cases where the page is opened, but Javascript is not executed until hours or days later.

Advertising

• Fixed an issue in Freewheel where a "Loading Ad" message would appear when an ad was not loading.

Updates

Core Player

• Rotating an Android device with a control-bar only (audio) player or when controls are disabled will not cause the player to go into fullscreen mode.

Advertising

• To make the player more resilient, if IMA erroneously clears the video tag when trying to resume playback from an ad, the player will try to recover by attempting to reload the item source.

Fixes

Captions

• Fixed an issue where the captions menu was not being cleared when switching from a playlist item with captions to one without captions.
• Fixed a captions issue where the last line of captions did not disappear at the correct time.
• Fixed an issue where natively rendered captions text did not scale correctly when entering fullscreen mode in iOS 11.4 and iOS 12 (beta).

360 (VR) Video

• Fixed an issue affecting some Android devices where the video view could not be controlled when moving the device.
• Fixed an issue where the video view would pan erratically or appear jittery during playback on some devices.
• Fixed a bug where adding a pre-roll before 360 content causes 360 functionality to be disabled.

Service release.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue causing players to fail to set up on websites using zone.js.

Updates

Advertising

• Expanded the on(‘adsManager’) event, which fires when the ad manager is loaded, to IMA. This event can be used to integrate with third-party vendors.

Fixes

Advertising

• Fixed an issue on iOS where tapping on an IMA ad was treated as a right click.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where closed captions were cut off in Android Chrome browsers for portrait and full-screen playback.

Updates

Core Player

• Added a new recommendations interface, the shelf widget, which will place a recommendations shelf directly below the player, outside of the player’s container by setting related.displayMode to shelfWidget.
• Added a new startTime configuration setting for playlist items that will instruct the player to begin playback of the media at the time specified.
• Added multiple channel support for EIA-608 Captions (CC1, CC2, CC3, CC4).

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue where a duration property with an empty string was being passed to the getPlaylist API getter.
• Fixed a bug where some casting icons would inherit the page’s button styles.
• Fixed an intermittent issue causing 'Cannot Load M3U8: 400' errors in HLS live streams.

Ads

• In IMA, fixed an issue with SpotX not loading when requireJS is used to instantiate a player.

Fixes

Ads

• Resolved a bug in the VAST ad plugin that arose in 8.4.3 where calling playAd() in on(‘beforePlay’) would cause the ad and content to play simultaneously.

Updates

Ads

• Updated ad preloading functionality in the VAST ad plugin to include preloading the preroll of subsequent playlist items.
• Added the configuration property ‘bidOnBreaks’ for Video Player Bidding to the VAST ad plugin.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue where incorrectly registering a plugin results in a setup error.
• Fixed an issue in iOS Safari where the captions would not be scaled correctly when in fullscreen.
• Fixed an issue In HLS streams where AAC segments with a timestamp of zero were considered to have no timestamp at all.

Ads

• Fixed an issue with custom ad countdown macros where xx would be incorrectly replaced with the countdown in cases where the macro is part of a word like ‘Hexx’.
• Fixed an issue with Video Player Bidding with DFP mediation where multiple key-value pairs could get added erroneously.
• Fixed an issue where the VAST ad plugin was not using the element of the VAST XML when provided to determine the skipoffset.
• Fixed an issue with the VAST ad plugin on iOS Safari where toggling the mute state when using vpaidcontrols:true sometimes had no effect.

Updates

Ads

• For FreeWheel ad plugin, added ‘PVRN’, ‘VPRN’ values to the ad request for forecasting purposes.
• For FreeWheel ad plugin, started passing ‘afid’, and ‘sfid’ values to the ad request for fallback purposes if the primary Asset ID and Site Section ID fail.

Fixes

Core Player

• Fixed an issue with players embedded through an iframe where the controls did not fade out when the user moused away from the video via the bottom of the player.
• Fixed an issue that would cause the playlist overlay to sometimes not resize correctly when the player size changes.
• Fixed an issue where custom playback rates were being rounded to the nearest .25 increment, rather than to the nearest hundredth digit.
• Fixed an issue where if the player was set up multiple times, it would reload javascript for a plugin that was already registered. We now ensure that individual plugins are only loaded and registered once. We now remove registered plugins that fail to load or instantiate (allowing new player setups to retry).

Ads

• Fixed an issue with the IMA ad plugin where the pause and fullscreen buttons may be inactive for prerolls following the first playlist item.
• Fixed an issue with the VAST ad plugin where certain VPAID ads might result in two new tabs being opened instead of a single tab when the user clicks the ad.