Introducing fleex Player

We’ve been through another period of intense development, to release what we think may radically change the way people use fleex to improve their English: a brand new VLC-based video player that packs all of fleex’s good stuff within a simple desktop app. Here’s what to expect from it.

Back to basics: local files = desktop app / streaming = browser

Using fleex with your own videos was always a bit of a broken experience. First of all, it was essentially made of a weird combination: local files, in a web browser.

The ability to play a video file on your computer has been around for quite a while, as has the notion of streaming a video stream from a website. However, these have traditionally been 2 very separate experience: if you wanted to play a video file from your hard drive, you used a desktop app. If you wanted to stream a video from the web, you fired up you browser. Using a browser to play a local video file was quite unheard of. Somehow though it was at the heart of the ‘fleex your own videos’ experience, making the whole rather convoluted for most users.

With the introduction of the fleex player, we are moving back to a more standard approach: if you want to watch a local video, you can use our desktop app. If you prefer streaming, you can go to http://fleex.tv/Home/Streaming and check out our online catalog.

 Better subtitles search

Finding the right subtitles for a video is a pain - if you’ve done it before, you know what I’m talking about. Fleex has paired up with opensubtitles to provide you with the best possible experience in subtitles searching. We don’t use your video’s filename to find matching subs: instead, we look at the file itself to generate a unique digital footprint that we then use to find subtitles. Think of it as a kind of Shazam, only for subtitles matching. This greatly reduces the risk of out-of-sync subtitles, as we are searching for subs corresponding to your exact video, whatever the release, encoding, repack, etc.

While this was already available in previous versions, the fleex player does add a new, long-awaited feature: the ability to submit your own subtitles file. Sometimes, with all the efforts in the world, our algorithm will fail at finding the right subtitles for your video. When that happens though, you’re not left with no options: you can now look for subtitles yourself on subtitles site, and submit them directly from within the fleex app.

Another feature we added to subtitles handling is live updating. If you’re not sure about what subtitles are the right ones for your video, fear not: you can click play and rest assured that you can make another selection anytime during the video. Simply click the ‘subtitles settings’ button, select the ‘Change subtitles’ tab and update your selection.

The learning experience: all of fleex’s features, with your own videos

The new fleex player adds the complete, full-blown fleex experience to your own videos. All the features you’ve come to love are available: adaptative subtitles, clickable words, subtitles navigation, idioms recognition… Plus one new little thing, in the form of that little turtle icon next to the ‘stop’ button: click it, and we’ll slow the video down for you so you can take the time to decorticate each and every word you hear.

What about fleex Premium?

As this post is being written, fleex player is at version 1.1.0 - the second version after the initial release, which happened about 2 weeks ago. In an effort to stay as lean as possible, we decided not to look too much into integrating fleex premium’s features into the player. This is of course a temporary situation, as this will change in the coming days. Incidentally, if you are a fleex premium user the only thing you won’t be able to do is adding words to your list - grammar notions recognition, highlighting of words in your list and progress tracking remain available in the player’s current version. 

What about fleex for Mac / Linux?

Mac and Linux versions are in the works, and while we cannot communicate on a fixed release date we can assure you that we’re doing everything we can to get it out there as soon as we can. To be notified of new releases, you can follow us on twitter.

NB: For more discussions about fleex player, head over to Hacker News

Fleex premium

As you may have noticed, last Friday night fleex underwent some important changes, mainly moving from a fully free service to a freemium model. While you can still watch videos for free, we took most of our advanced learning tools and put them behing a paywall. In this post I’d like to explain our reasoning and go over some of the changes we’ve made along with the move.

Going freemium

A lot of you were curious about how we actually survived, running a free website with no ads. Truth be told: since fleex started less than a year ago, we haven’t made any money. Zero. Zilch, not a penny. While counter-intuitive, the decision to delay monetization was a very conscious one - looking back, we have every reason to believe it was the right one to make. As it turns out, web consumers have grown very demanding over the years. Creating a service that people actually use has become hard. So hard, in fact, that we figured we needed to put all chances on your side. To do that, we decided we’d let as many people as possible get their hands on what we were coding, and for that to happen we had to start with a free product.

Where did that get us? Well, since fleex’s first beta came out in June 2012 we’ve received more than 800 feedback messages from our users. We’ve paid a lot of attention to those messages, replying to each of them personally. They’ve helped us tremendously in making fleex the great product it is today. Thanks to them, we believe we’ve reached a certain level of maturity, and created a service that’s not only worth using, but also worth paying for.

Fleex uses some of the greatest video productions on the free interwebs, and we’re extremely thankful that it is even possible. The YouTube videos our catalog is based on are available for free outside of fleex, so we saw no reason to stop our users from watching them on fleex. As a free user, you’ll still be able to watch all the videos you want with mixed subtitles, subtitles navigation, notifications and clickable words. This comes free of charge, and we’re hoping that this will help a lot of folks out there to get their English substantially better for free.

For thoses who want to dig deeper, or learn faster, we’ll be offering the more advanced educational tools we’ve put together - the vocab list and exercises, the grammar tree, and the progression dashboard - for a cheap, 9€ / month subscription. Premium users can also expect lots of changes and new features as time goes by - if you’ve been following fleex for a while, you’ve probably noticed that we’re constantly iterating and improving our product. This isn’t going away.

Other changes

Aside from the move to freemium, we’ve made substantial changes to the way our users can authenticate on fleex. We’ve added the possibility to use a simple email / password combination, which should please those wary to use their social accounts. We’ve also merged all accounts created with the same email into a single account. We’ve been very careful about keeping all the data safe: for instance if you’ve added different words in different vocab lists, you can be sure the lists were merged without data loss. Of course, the new merged account can be accessed through any external service initially used to create the duplicates.

Another change we’ve done is we’ve completely revamped the account admin page to let you easily view and modify your personal data. You can now edit your billing info, set up reminders to help you practice regularly, and link more external accounts to your profile in a simple, elegant tabbed interface.

We hope you like it, and can’t wait to find you on fleex!

Grammar comes to fleex

We’ve been pretty quiet for a couple of months. When that happens, you can be pretty darn sure something big is in the works. Step by step, we’re making fleex a more advanced English learning platform, and today I’m happy to announce that we’re bringing grammar to fleex. Like much of the educational features on fleex, grammar is opt-in. If you feel that your grammar doesn’t need us, don’t expect us to come nagging you during your video. However, if you’d like to let fleex help you I’ll explain how we can do that.

The Grammar tree

We’ve added a new ‘Grammar’ menu item to your home page and menu: this will lead you to your personal grammar tree. Your tree is to grammar what the vocab list is to vocabulary: a central place where you define and review the things you’d like to learn. In this case, we’ve worked with a team of linguists to create and sequence a list of all important notions in the English grammar. We cover a large span of concepts, from modals to linking words to various tenses. Every notion is given with its corresponding Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) level, so you always know where you are in terms of difficulty.

The first thing you can do with the notions is to simply consult them. Clicking any notion in the tree will bring up a video explanation of the notion to help you understand what it’s all about. As we continue our work on the gramar tree, we’ll textual explanation, examples, etc.

Following notions

The next thing you’ll see are the 2 buttons on each notion. The ‘mark as mastered’ button is pretty straight-forward, and lets you mark a notion as mastered. Mastered notions appear in a green color, so you know your objective: paint that tree in green! The ‘follow’ button deserves more explanations: what it does is it lets you track a notion in your videos. Say you want to work on the present continuous: by tracking this notion, you tell fleex to select occurences of it in the videos you watch and notify you when they come up.

You know what - that’s enough talking. I’ll just let you get your hands on all this and see for yourself. And if there’s anything you’d like to say, there’s always that ‘feedback button on our site!

Introducing fleex for Windows

Disclaimer: this post is for Windows users only. Mac users will have to wait until the beginning of 2013 to be able to fleex their own videos. Hang on in their folks!

Used to be that fleexing a video was rather complicated. Used to be that you had to manually copy and paste the path to your video in order to be able to watch it. Used to be that the whole process was so frustrating we lost a lot of you guys in the process… Friends, that time is over!

If you haven’t already, just head to http://fleex.tv/FleexYourOwn and download fleex’s Windows application. Done? Now restart your favorite browser, right-click any video and click ‘fleex my video’. You’re all set!

Sweet, ain’t it?

Disclaimer

Just like any fresh release, the fleex application is still in beta version. If anything goes wrong with your experience, please make sure to let us know using the ‘feedback’ tab at the top left of the fleex website!

Vocabulary Exercises

Last Friday we released a new version of fleex, and for the first time we introduced vocabulary exercises to the platform.

Three different types of exercises

To start with, we focused on 3 types of exercises. We’ll add more with time, but here’s what we have so far:

• ‘Fill the blank’ exercises give you an English sentence with a gap in it, and require you to fill that gap. In addition to the context of the sentence, we provide you with definitions of the missing word to help you guess what it is. 
• ‘Find best translation’ exercises give you a word in English and require you to find the best translation for it
• ‘Match definitions’ exercises require you to look at a list of 8 words and pick the best match for each of the 4 definitions we present you with

 Space-based repetition

There’s been a fair bunch of studies on the inner workings of memory. One of the conclusions that is widely accepted is that the optimal way to effectively remember something is to repeatedly be reminded about that thing.

Exactly when to be reminded really depends. Let’s say you’re trying to learn a word: the theory affirms that the first reminder should come shortly after you first encountered the word. Once you’ve got the word firmly implanted in your short-term memory, you can stop thinking about it for while. Wait a couple of days, just enough not to forget it, and then practice again. This time you’re implanting the word in your middle-term memory. Once you’re there, pause again - for a longer period, since you know the word better. Then practice again. You get the gist.

At fleex we’ve implemented space-based repetition at the heart of our exercises. Here’s how it works:

• When you add a word to your vocabulary list, it is immediately marked as available for you to practice. If you head to the exercises page, you’ll be able to work on it until you reach the ‘short-term’ level of memorization.
• Once you’ve reached the short-term memorization level, the word gets ‘deactivated’ for a while. After you’ve waited long enough, we then reactivate it to let you practice it again. The objective, this time, is to unlock the ‘middle-term’ level.
• We repeat the same process for the ‘long-term’ memorization level. Once you’ve reached that final level, we consider the word to be mastered and stop suggesting exercises 

This system allows us to teach you words that are here to stay - the old times of huge vocabulary lists transiting in and out of your brain are over!

Disclaimer

I’ll finish with a disclaimer: even though we’re seeing more and more people using fleex, we’re still keen on using the ‘Lean Startup’ methodology as much as possible. This means we delivered on the idea of exercises as fast as possible - as a consequences, you may encounter bugs from time to time. When that happens, please make sure to report it using the corresponding button, at the bottom left corner of the exercises window:

RIP, vocabulary test

At the beginning of this week, we got rid of our  “vocabulary test”. The idea behind this feature was to test your knowledge of the English vocabulary. Not that we completely abandoned the idea of assessing your level (see our previous post), but we’d rather take a different approach. Here is why and how.

It’s just too complicated!

Here is a quick reminder of what the vocabulary test looked like:

General feedback was that the test itself was pretty straightforward: if you know the word, click “yes”; if you don’t, click “no”. The problem, though, was in what we did with the results. As it stood, the test brought little value to our users. Statistics were difficult to understand for most users. No clear action was suggested in conjunction with the conclusions we could draw. As a result, we decided to pull the plug and give ourselves more space for a compete overhaul.

Focusing on things that matters

Here are the few criteria that we’ll focus on for the next version:

• Objective: probably the only criterion addressed by the previous version. With regular school exercises, you can’t get away from subjective grading: you write an essay, you have an oral exam… Not that it’s bad in itself, but we believe that on fleex, we can provide you with undisputable facts to help you know exactly where you should put your efforts.
• Easy understandable: clearly a weak point of the previous vocabulary test. Not that you cannot hide complex algorithms or methods, but they should be under the hood. Very quickly, the user should be able to understand her progress and take actions according to that.
• Adapted (or personalized): that may seem obvious but that is probably the most complicated criterion. Why would a user loose her precious time doing exercises on something she already knows very well? The user should continuously be challenged so that she always learns something, but not too much so that she does not feel discouraged.

Would you agree on that? We count on you to challenge us on each of those points!

Work in Progress

Are you doing well?

Fleex’s primary mission is to help you get better at English. We, obvioulsy enough, believe our method works. But most importantly, we want you to be convinced. We want to give you means to measure your progress, and get a sense of how you’re doing. To that effect, with this week’s new release we’ve added a new ‘progression’ panel - in this post I’ll go over its inner workings.

Your progress

Here’s what it looks like - the new page that will help you track your progress on fleex:

We split the panel in 3 parts:

1displays your overall progress in English with fleex. It gives you a quick overview of what you have done so far. And remember this post? It has to be easily understandable and objective.

We show you the time you spent watching English videos on fleex, the number of words you have learnt and the number of words you are currently learning (e.g. words in your vocabulary list). We have several ways in mind to further improve this part, but that will be the topic of another post.

2helps you track your daily activity. Learning a new language requires a regular practice and that is precisely what we insist on here.

Day by day, you can see how many videos you watched, how long they were and how many words you practiced. You can also sign up for daily email reminders. Another thing we plan on doing to enrich this part is letting you set up your own goals.

3shows your journey to the Holy Grail: watching videos in English without subtitles.

Depending on your level, the curve starts at a different level but in general, the curve should go up. Of course videos have very different levels of difficulty, and you may like fiddling about with the subtitles repartition so you will probably notice swings in your curve.

The more videos you watch on fleex though, the more you will understand and the closer you’ll get to watching videos like any English speaker.

Of course, this panel is only at its 1st version and as always, we’re using your feedback to improve fleex. We will enrich this console in the future to be faithful to our goal: make your learning more efficient and more fun.

Notifications

Of course, it had tons of shortcomings. There was only 1 episode. Ergonomy was poor. Worst of all: it wasn’t scalable. All of the content we used we had written ourselves: we had in-video notifications that gave contextual information - all written manually. We had exercises that trained your comprehension, vocabulary and grammar skills - all written manually. We even validated each user manually…

Naturally, when we began to work on the public beta we quickly realized that a lot had to go. In our minds it was clear that fleex wasn’t going to be an editing company. Sacrificing scalability was too high a price to pay, so instead we decided to focus on other features: subtitles mixing and clickable words.

Today we’re really happy to bring notifications back to fleex. Notifications are a key element to our method. They solve an important problem for our learners, which is that there’s more to a language than grammar, or vocabulary. There are times when you get all the words, get the structure, and yet the whole thing still doesn’t make sense. Notifications help by going beyond individual words to explain groups of words. Expressions, idioms, proverbs, all these locutions that beginners have little chance to figure out on their own. Fleex warns you when they come up, and displays an explanation when you pause the video or hover the notification:

 Soon you’ll be able to save the expressions just as you can do words, to practice them later. 

What do you think? Is this something you might use? Go ahead and try it yourself!

http://beta.fleex.tv

Subtitles Navigation

Easy access to easier subtitles

The first problem has to do with subtitles level. While we’ve worked hard to make our mixing algorithm as efficient as possible, it sometimes happens that a line appears in English while you’d rather have had it in your native language. In that case you still have the option to click words and try to understand what you’ve missed, however this is an incomplete solution for at least 2 reasons:

• Individual words ignore the global context of the video
• If you’re an advanced speaker struggling with an ‘empty’ subtitle, you’re out of luck - there’s nothing you can click for help

We solved this by changing the behavior of the video when hitting the ‘pause’ button: doing so now displays the current subtitle in an easier format, to help you better understand things you might have missed:

• If you use mixed subtitles (English + your native language), pausing the video will show the current subtitle in both languages
• If you use filtered subtitles (English + empty subtitles), pausing the video will display the current subtitle in English

This way you always have easy access to easier subtitles.

 Jump from subtitle to subtitle

The second problem is a classic for anybody that ever tried to replay a specific scene in a movie or episode. You see, the seek bar is so small, and the video so long that jumping to a specific moment is virtually impossible - especially when that moment is only a few seconds before the current position.

The truth of the matter is that the seek bar is probably the worst tool for that specific need. The right unit of measure isn’t seconds, minutes, or percents of the video: it’s lines. When you miss something you want to be able to go back to the last line the dude said, or the one before. That, precisely, is what we let you do now.

When you pause the video, we show arrows on the left and right of the screen: these let you navigate in your video, jumping from subtitle to subtitle. You can also use your keyboard: press space to pause the video, and use the arrow keys to navigate. Note that you can also use the arrow keys while the video is playing: for each press on the left / right arrow key, we’ll go back / forward 10 seconds.

That’s it! We hope you like it - go ahead and tell us what you think!