As a course and content creator I've looked all over for the best solutions to help me deliver video content. I finally found a solution that I think is the best video player, and it works great with my course platform of choice: Thrive Apprentice.
Get the Presto Player Lifetime Deal! It's called Presto Player.
Presto Player is a video player for WordPress full of features that I haven't found anywhere else:
- Playback speed
- Muted auto-play
- Overlays
- Video chapters
- Detailed viewer analytics
- BunnyNet integration
- Marketing automations with Uncanny Automator
Below is the Youtube video I made as a complete walkthrough of the Presto Player platform.
Shortcode Integration with Thrive Apprentice
To integrate Presto Player with Thrive Apprentice you simply take the shortcode found in the Media Hub and paste it into a text element inside a Thrive Apprentice Lesson.
The "video lesson" option in Thrive Apprentice will not work because the video we want to use is going to be served through Presto Player as an intermediary and not directly from an external source.
If you want to use CSS to remove the "top" section image area of the Thrive Apprentice lesson pages, you can use the CSS below:
.tva-featured-image-container-single {
display: none;
}
Now your Presto Player will be the top thing they see and look just like this:
Thrive Themes publicly stated that we will soon (within a few updates) have the ability to customize the course index pages. This means that soon we will be able to customize what these pages look using just as we would any page on our website with Thrive Architect. Translation: We can make our Presto Player video placement look like whatever want!
Host Your Videos with BunnyNet for Pennies
What really caused me to make the swap over to Presto Player was the tight integration with BunnyNet. When you store your video files and host them for streaming through BunnyNet, you're paying pennies. Literally. My monthly bill for usage with BunnyNet after six months of using them as a CDN and now as a video storage solution was $0.06.
BunnyNet has a $1 monthly minimum, so despite the pennies it's $1/month. Contrast that with Vimeo, my former video host, which cost me $20/month.
The left number is my cost for what I've used for data, and the right is what I'm paying to store my videos.
Integration is simple. You just paste in your API key. That's it. Presto Player creates all the pull zones and tricky stuff for you.
You also get the option for your videos to be private or public. Private videos in Presto Player through BunnyNet are only visible to people who are logged in to your site, and the links used are automatically expiring.
Where Presto Player Can Improve
As of now, which is the first month Presto Player has been out, there are only a few things I have on my list of improvements that I'd like to see:
- Folders to organize videos in the Media Hub (we can tag, but I want to put things in folders)
- Direct integration with Thrive Apprentice so that we can paste the shortcode into a Video Lesson rather than putting the Shortcode in a lesson itself
Presto Player is a terrific product because of the features it provides to content creators, and a no-brainer money saver for business owners or anyone tired of paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year to host videos for courses and sales pages. I'm excited for what the future will bring with deeper integrations with my tech stack.
Looks great Doug. I had read about it but it had slipped off my radar – so thanks for the reminder! I picked up the lifetime deal via your link.
I’ve been meaning to ask you…I paste the shortcode in, and it works, but it’s a lot of guesswork to figure out what it’s going to look like in coordination with other items on the page because it doesn’t appear in the visual editor. Do you have recommended best practices for padding and margins? Thank you!
I use the default without making any changes to margin or padding. I just insert the player in and let it responsively fill the space.
Hi Doug – I seem to get a lot of padding at the top and bottom of my video (non on the sides), more on the bottom though. I don’t know if this CSS is supposed to get rid of padding around the video or not, and if so where do I put it. I tried to put it in the CSS on the media page for the video and nothing seemed to happen to the video.
I have checked that the “Layout & Position on Thrive is set to zero too – Not sure if this is a THrive problem or a Presto-Player problem. Thank you.
I think it’s a presto issue. This post is a bit dated and Thrive has since significantly revamped their setup. I don’t have the padding issue anymore in the new Thrive templates.