Over the past few weeks, I’ve been designing a basic site (in WordPress) for a new client. This client needs some embedded FLVs on the site, and doesn’t want them (for good reason) to be directly linked to YouTube. As such, and seeing as I didn’t want to make the client write the HTML for embedding a flash video, I installed a very simple FLV plugin called WP OS FLV.
The plugin worked exactly as I had hoped it would, by cleanly showing the FLV with just a few basic options. However, I noticed that the pages with FLVs embedded in them using the plugin were significantly slower to load than were pages without FLVs. Doing some fun experimentation with cURL, I found that those pages had some external calls on them. Hmmmmmm, now what would the plugin need from an external site? Doing a little more digging, I found the following line hardcoded twice in the plugin’s wposflv.php file:
<param name="movie" value="http://flv-player.net/medias/player_flv_maxi.swf" />
That line means that if the site flv-player.net is down or slow, the page with the FLV plugin on your blog will also be slow. In order to fix this problem, you simply need to download the player_flv_maxi.swf file from that site, upload it somewhere on your server, and edit the line to call the location on your server instead. For instance, if your site is my-site.com, and you put the SWF file in a directory called static, you would change the absolute URL to:
<param name="movie" value="http://my-site.com/static/player_flv_maxi.swf" />
If you too were having problems with this plugin being a bit slow, I hope that this suggestion helps!
Cheers,
Zach
