TruePlayer is a native WordPress video and audio player with its own controls, so every video on your site looks and behaves the same — wherever it is hosted.
- Sources — self-hosted files from the media library, any MP4/WebM URL, HLS streams (.m3u8), YouTube and Vimeo.
- Audio player — a proper audio bar with cover art, waveform and compact/card/minimal layouts.
- Your look — skins, accent and hover colors, play-button styles, control-bar styles, roundness, aspect ratio, logo watermark, and a site-wide default that every video inherits.
- Controls — choose exactly which buttons show; speed, quality, captions, picture-in-picture, keyboard shortcuts, rewind/forward and download.
- Chapters & captions — YouTube-style segmented chapters, multi-track subtitles with styling, and a transcript drawer.
- Behaviour — autoplay modes, loop, resume where the viewer left off, sticky player on scroll, no-skip, click-to-load poster for fast pages.
- Engagement — call-to-action and end-screen overlays, text overlays, an action bar, and email-capture forms (sent to your inbox).
- Playlists & presets — sidebar or grid playlists with autoplay-next, and reusable player presets.
- Block & shortcode — a block with an in-editor preview, plus
[trueplayer id="…"], a popup/lightbox shortcode and playlist shortcode.
- SEO — VideoObject structured data and Google Analytics (GA4) playback events.
Everything in this plugin works on its own. A separate add-on, TruePlayer Pro, adds features of its own such as watch verification, quizzes, analytics and automation.
1.7.4 - 24-10-2026
- Changed - Removed the unused progress, quiz-attempts, engagement and daily tables from the free plugin; they are no longer created on activation, and uninstall cleanup was updated to match.
1.7.3 - 17-10-2026
- Security: Colour settings (accent and other colour fields) are now strictly validated on save and at render time.
1.7.2 - 14-10-2026
- Security - Public opt-in REST endpoint (
/wp-json/trueplayer/v1/optin) now requires a wp_rest nonce, applies a per-IP+video rate limit, and includes a honeypot field to block form-walking bots.
- Changed - Admin screens no longer remove queued
admin_notices callbacks; a CSS-only suppression keeps the layout clean while leaving other plugins' notices in the DOM.
- Changed - Admin asset enqueue now matches TruePlayer's own page hooks exactly instead of a substring on the plugin slug.
- Changed - YouTube caption importer sends an honest
TruePlayer/<version>; <site_url> User-Agent instead of a browser-spoofing one.
- Added -
uninstall.php drops this plugin's custom tables, options, transients and generated poster attachments when the site owner deletes the plugin. Honours a trueplayer_keep_data_on_uninstall option, and runs per-site on multisite.
- Changed - Readme tags no longer use third-party brand names.
1.7.1 - 14-10-2026
- Fixed - Activation schema no longer uses
JSON columns or DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, so tables create cleanly on MySQL versions WordPress still supports.
- Fixed - Schema sync now verifies every expected table exists before recording the database version, so a silent
dbDelta failure can no longer mark the install as upgraded.
- Fixed - Seed data and preset-preview samples no longer reference remote demo files; sources start empty and the author picks their own media.
- Security - The video-preview REST route now requires edit rights on the specific video, not just a generic edit-posts capability.
- Changed - Vimeo poster transient is now namespaced as
trueplayer_vimeo_poster_ to avoid colliding with other plugins' short prefixes.
1.7.0 - 11-10-2026
- Changed - Everything in the free plugin now works on its own, with no locked options. Features that belong to TruePlayer Pro now ship only in that add-on.
- Changed - HLS streams, Google Analytics events and YouTube caption import are free.
- Removed - Interactive (H5P) content moved to TruePlayer Pro.
- Removed - Custom CSS fields — use the Customizer or Site Editor's Additional CSS instead.
- Security - Quick-editing a video from the block editor now also checks you can edit that video.
- Changed - Player settings are passed to the page as data attributes instead of inline script tags; admin styles load through the WordPress style queue.
- Changed - Updated the StoreEngine SDK to 1.6.2.
- Added - Readme documents where the source for the compiled scripts lives and how to rebuild it.
1.6.1 - 10-10-2026
- Security - Harden inline player config against breakout — JSON blobs rendered beside the player, popup and playlist now escape
</script> sequences.
- Changed - Plugin URI updated to https://true-player.net/.
- Changed - Rename post types and taxonomy to plugin-prefixed slugs (
truepl_video, truepl_preset, truepl_video_tag, truepl_playlist) to avoid collisions. Existing content is migrated automatically on first admin load.
- Changed - Admin-area white-labeling no longer touches player attribution (the player carries none to suppress).
- Added - Readme now documents every external service the plugin can contact, with Terms and Privacy links.
1.6.0 - 24-09-2026
- Added - Quality selector: Auto plus every available level, in the gear menu or as a one-tap button. Bunny Stream, Mux, Gumlet ABR, HLS, YouTube and Vimeo.
- Added - The viewer's quality choice is remembered across videos.
- Added - Rapid Engage Bar: a simulated seek bar that runs ahead early so a video feels shorter. Needs Pro.
- Added - Seek bar is now its own section in the player editor.
- Added - Waveform is selectable as a video seek bar style, not only for audio.
- Added - Separate Rapid Engage speeds for desktop and mobile.
- Fixed - The volume slider's indicator sat above its track instead of on it.
- Fixed - Firefox drew the volume fill thicker than the track it was filling.
- Fixed - The volume slider could be squashed by a host theme's input styles.
1.5.0 - 14-09-2026
- Added - Two more audio starting points: Audiobook and Playlist.
- Added - Podcast and Audiobook are now audio bars of their own, not just switched-on controls. Need Pro.
- Added - Video and Audio filters in the media library.
- Added - The create dialog names the look a new item will use.
- Added - "Start from a template" in the preset builder — a whole look in one click.
- Added - The site-wide default look is now set separately for video and audio.
- Added - A short description on every template tile, on hover or keyboard focus.
- Fixed - A site-wide video template pushed its skin and aspect ratio onto audio items.
- Fixed - Choosing a template added to the saved look instead of replacing it.
- Fixed - A site-wide default preset never showed in the editor preview.
- Fixed - Saving Settings did not refresh the audio defaults until the page was reloaded.
- Fixed - A default preset overrode the template tiles with nothing on screen to say so.
- Fixed - Template tiles showed a PRO badge even with TruePlayer Pro active.
- Fixed - Audio items offered "Generate from video" for cover art, which could only fail.
- Fixed - The unsaved-changes dialog opened at full width for a single sentence.
- Fixed - The Minimal audio bar and the Simple video skin looked alike in the picker.
- Security - Videos inside a playlist skipped the free-plan clamp, leaking premium source URLs into the page.
- Security - A video title containing markup could break out of the SEO data block and run script.
- Security - Hardened the importer, an interactive-engine query, and imported caption parsing.
- Changed - Template tiles redesigned: light preview, and a brand-blue tick on the chosen one.
- Changed - The audio bar's shape is now called "Skin", the same as video.
- Changed - Free starting points sit above the Pro ones, which are grouped and labelled.
- Changed - The default audio look is Minimal, so a fresh install starts on something it can use.
- Changed - The default aspect ratio setting now says it never reaches an audio item.
1.4.0 - 10-09-2026
- Added - Audio as its own media type — Video / Audio tabs when creating media.
- Added - Three audio layouts: compact bar, card, and minimal.
- Added - Audio presets, separate from video ones, with Podcast, Album and Bare starting points.
- Added - Audio control toggles: previous / next track, playback speed, chapters & transcript.
- Added - Previous / next track buttons in playlists.
- Added - Automatic audio detection from the file extension, so imported and pasted audio needs no re-saving.
- Added - Site-wide default presets for video and audio, under Settings → General.
- Added - A "When attempts run out" policy — lock and require a re-watch, or never lock. Overridable per video.
- Added - Audio wording and icons in Bunny.net Storage and Gumlet uploads.
- Fixed - Re-watching after using every quiz attempt gave only one attempt instead of a fresh set.
- Fixed - A checkpoint before the completion threshold could lock a re-watching viewer out for good.
- Fixed - Audio items previewed as a video player in the editor.
- Fixed - The minimal audio layout rendered as an empty white box on light backgrounds.
- Fixed - Audio was published to search engines as video.
- Fixed - The audio preset's "Preview with" row did not line up with the preview below it.
- Fixed - Fields took their border from WordPress instead of the plugin.
- Changed - Player controls are defined in one place, so the editor and player can't drift apart.
- Changed - The editor hides settings that cannot apply to audio.
- Changed - The Interactive tab is always shown, with a teaser when the addon is off.
- Changed - All dialogs open at the same width.
1.3.0 - 06-09-2026
- Added - Gumlet as a video source — upload a file from the editor, or use one already in your Gumlet workspace. Needs Pro.
- Added - Uploads go straight from the browser to Gumlet, with drag & drop, progress and cancel. PHP's upload size limit no longer applies, and your API key never leaves the server.
- Added - Gumlet settings under Settings → Sources & CDN, with your workspaces offered as a list.
- Added - Signed, expiring links for Gumlet videos marked private.
- Added - A video saved while Gumlet is still encoding starts playing on its own when encoding finishes.
- Fixed - Premium sources leaked their real media URL into the page on free installs. The location is now stripped on the server.
- Fixed - Bunny.net Storage videos could not be marked private, played on free installs despite being premium, and showed a raw "bunnyStorage" badge.
- Fixed - HLS video failed to play in Chrome — the player trusted Chrome's claim that it supports HLS and skipped hls.js.
- Fixed - Playback failures said only "Playback error". They now name the cause.
1.2.0 - 03-09-2026
- Added - Direct Bunny.net Storage uploads from the editor with drag & drop, picker, progress bar, and cancel support.
- Added - Bunny.net Storage file browser to reuse existing uploads.
- Added - Bunny.net Storage credentials under Settings → Sources & CDN.
- Added - 4 MB chunked uploads for large files.
- Added - Post-upload URL verification with playback error details.
- Added - Collapsible Bunny.net settings sections with status badges.
- Added - Bunny.net Storage as a source in the Create Media dialog.
- Added - QuizPress quiz as an alternative question source for checkpoints and the final quiz.
- Added - Inline QuizPress quiz-taking UI, question-by-question, using QuizPress's own answer widgets and grading.
- Added - Real pass/fail and score read from QuizPress's own attempt data.
- Added - A no-penalty "awaiting manual review" outcome for QuizPress quizzes with manually-reviewed questions.
- Added - QuizPress passing grade, attempt limit, and manual-review warnings shown in the Gating tab.
- Added - Live-preview grading for QuizPress-sourced quizzes.
- Added - "Try again" after a failed QuizPress-sourced checkpoint.
- Added - Drag-and-drop reordering and a collapsible accordion for checkpoint and question lists.
- Added - The editor's active tab now stays in the URL, so a reload keeps your place.
- Added - A "What's New" panel in the admin top bar.
- Fixed - Bunny.net Storage Private mode not applying token protection.
- Fixed - Bunny.net token signing for single files and HLS directories.
- Fixed - Single-file tokens potentially unlocking an entire folder.
- Fixed - The standalone video page to provide a clean, shareable URL.
- Fixed - The frontend volume slider stretching to fill the control bar on some themes.
- Fixed - The settings/speed menu not closing on an outside click.
- Fixed - Arrow key volume/seek shortcuts also scrolling the page.
1.1.0 - 01-09-2026
- Fixed - Saving a video, preset or playlist whose settings contained a double quote or a backslash wiped the whole configuration, source and layers included. Adding a shortcode layer was the easiest way to hit it.
- Fixed - Aspect ratio "Auto (native)" rendered an invisible
- Fixed - Caption background colour and background opacity had no effect during playback.
- Fixed - Loop stopped the end of a video ever being reached,
- Fixed - silently disabling the final quiz, end screen, end email gate, reset-on-end and playlist auto-advance.
- Fixed - "Disable the timeline entirely" left the arrow keys and the rewind and fast-forward buttons still able to seek.
- Fixed - "Start muted" was ignored on YouTube and Vimeo sources.
- Fixed - The editor preview shared its saved playback position with the front end, so it could open part-way through a video.
- Fixed - A caption track marked as default reported itself as off while it was being displayed.
- Fixed - Playback failures gave no reason. A YouTube video that disallows embedding is now named as such.
- Fixed - Discarding a preset or playlist edit left the discarded changes on screen.
- Fixed - Video control, audio playback, source type and interactive email form issues reported during testing.
- Improved - Removing a video now also removes the poster that came from it, instead of leaving it in the media library.
- Improved - Video titles are reduced to plain single-line text and capped in length
- Improved - The control bar now appears as soon as the media is ready, not only after playback starts.
- Improved - Layer timings are entered as hours, minutes and seconds instead of raw seconds, and layer rows read as timestamps.
- Improved - The editor's eye toggle now genuinely previews a layer, ignoring its time window and taking it down again afterwards.
- Improved - Settings the preview cannot demonstrate now say so, and "Reset to start when finished" is disabled while Loop is on.
- Improved - Shortcode layers show a placeholder in the editor preview instead of appearing empty, and their inline scripts now run.
- Improved - Self-hosted video workflow, audio player styling, H5P media options and admin submenu presentation.
- Added - Email capture now works with no CRM connected: a built-in Email notification provider mails each capture to the site administrator.
- Added - An Email form layer with two modes, gate (pauses the video) and inline (does not interrupt). The old Email capture section merged into it and is converted on upgrade.
- Added - Conditional display rules on layers: logged in, CRM contact, tag or list, URL parameter, or having seen or completed another layer.
- Added - A poster field and media file card in the Source step, so a file and its poster are managed together.
- Added - Player preset templates in Settings, with presets resolved in the live preview.
- Added - A trueplayer:layer-rendered DOM event, so code that initialises at page load can pick up layers added mid-playback.
1.0.0 - 27/08/2026
First stable release. TruePlayer ships as a native WordPress video & audio player built for enforcement and automation.
Player
- Native React player with multiple skins (default, modern, simple, minimal, standard).
- Sources: self-hosted / direct URL, HLS, audio, YouTube and Vimeo.
- Full customization: control toggles, autoplay/loop/save-position/sticky-float, preload & load strategy (facade/eager/on-visible), accent color, play-button style, roundness, control-bar style, aspect ratio, caption size/color/background, playback speeds, Picture-in-Picture.
-
Optional bundled H5P interactive engine (import + render H5P content, xAPI fed into the event pipeline).
Watch verification
-
Server-authoritative coverage tracking proves a viewer genuinely watched (whole-second progress only), with anti-skip / seek-jump and playback-rate guards.
Quiz gating
-
Checkpoint and end-gate questions attached to a video; server-side grading (answers never sent to the client). Failing locks the video and resets coverage until the viewer re-watches and re-attempts. (Enforcement activates with TruePlayer Pro.)
Events & webhooks
-
Event bus: view.started, progress.milestone, view.completed, checkpoint.passed/failed, quiz.passed/failed, video.locked/unlocked, subscriber.added.
-
HMAC-SHA256 signed JSON webhooks (X-TruePlayer-Signature header) for automation tools.
Admin
-
React single-page admin: Dashboard, Media library, Editor, Playlists, Presets, Settings.
- WP-CLI
trueplayer command; REST API across videos, progress, grading, playlists, presets, subtitles, viewers and webhooks.