Frequently Asked Questions

We built fleex as an "educative layer" on top of existing content. Today fleex can be used with 3 different sources of content:

• YouTube: we’ve made a selection of some of the best YouTube videos out there, including a large number of webseries as well as most of the TED conferences. These videos can be watched straight from our site, once you’ve created an account.
• Video files: if you have video files on your hard drive (avi, mp4, mkv etc.), you can watch them with fleex Player. This video player will download the best available subtitles for your video, and add the fleex educative layer on top of it, on the fly.)
• Netflix: if you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can use our Google Chrome extension to add fleex’s educational layer on top of your Netflix videos. Just install the extension, launch a Netflix video, activate fleex and you’re good to go!)

Fleex is compatible with most of Netflix videos captioned in English - you can browse those videos here.

There are 3 possible reasons for the extension malfunctioning:

• You don’t have the latest version of the extension: to rule out this possibility, go to chrome://extensions and click the “update extensions now” button
• You’ve disabled Chrome’s cookies (a barred cookie icon will in general appear in this case, in the right part of the address bar): you’ll need to enable them following these instructions.
• Your Netflix player isn’t the "official" one: Netflix may be testing a new player interface with a portion of its users, which might be breaking our integration. To make sure you’re always using Netflix’s official player (the one supported by fleex), you can follow this link and disable tests.

If none of these solutions work, send us an email and we'll look into your issue.

The vocabulary lists you’re referring to are offered independent of fleex’s viewing experience. You can use them to prepare a viewing session on fleex, just as well as a night at the movies or a TV binge-watching session.

If you’d like to watch one of the videos in the list with fleex, you have several options:

• If you’re a fleex subscriber, and the video is available on Netflix, you can install our Fleex for Netflix extension for Google Chrome to add fleex to Netflix
• If you have the video on your computer as a video file on your hard drive, you can watch it with Fleex player, just as you would with, say, VLC

In case you’re having doubts on how to use the movies and TV Shows vocabulary lists, you can always click the "?" button in any of them to get more information.

While a couple of English-speaking users mentioned using fleex "upside down" to learn another language, fleex is tailored for English learning only.

Our method can be adapted to learn other languages as well and we will work on it in the future. But not for now, as our small team have other priorities.

Unfortunately, fleex requires a reliable internet connection to function properly.

This is a requirement that can’t easily be bypassed as our service heavily relies on external resources like video providers (eg YouTube, Netflix) or dictionary APIs (eg Reverso, WordReference, Bing Translator).

We could indeed think about integrating AirPlay or Chromecast to let you stream your video to your TV. However, this isn’t part of our priorities: we designed fleex as an interactive player, and with AirPlay / Chromecast much of the interactivity (clickable words, subtitles navigation etc.) would be unavailable.

We could simply stream the video with mixed subtitles, but the resulting experience wouldn’t be as rich and this is why we’d rather focus on other features for now.

One thing you need to understand is that we don’t create the subtitles ourselves - instead, we fetch them in realtime from the internet, with one important constraint : since the subtitles will be mixed, they need to be “mixable”. Concretely, this means they need to be compatible with each other: for each line in one subtitles file there needs to be a corresponding line with the same timing in the other subtitles file.

Practically speaking, we can’t guarantee that this will happen for each and every video on Fleex player. However, based on our usage stats it does in a majority of cases. Here are a couple of rules of thumb:

• Generally speaking, TV shows have more subtitles than movies, especially recent ones
• Popular movies are generally well covered, event though it usually takes a bit of time before the very most recent ones get subtitled in languages other than English

This may not be the answer you were expecting, and there’s unfortunately not much we can do: for some videos, subtitles in your language are simply not available.

When your subtitles are out of sync with the video, there are 2 possible cases:

• The shift between your video and the subtitles is fixed, in which case all you need to do is reposition the subtitles correctly clicking the ‘CC’ button and then ‘shift subs’.
• The shift between your video and the subtitles increases with time : this means the selected subtitles don’t correspond to the video you’re watching. Fleex uses an algorithm to find subtitles that match your video - though it works in most cases, it may sometimes not work correctly and select the wrong subtitles. When that happens, you can try other subtitles by clicking the ‘CC’ button and then ‘change subs’.

There are 2 possible situations here: hardcoded subtitles and embedded subtitles. In the first case, your subtitles are provided within the video stream itself, as if they had been filmed together with the video's actual sequences. In this case there is really nothing we can do, for at least 2 reasons:

• we have no way to remove the subtitles
• extracting the subtitles to process them would require doing character recognition, which would take far too much time and resources.

In the second case we could, in theory, extract your subtitles from the video container. While this is something we currently don't support, we may support it in future releases of the player.

We don’t yet offer native iOS or Android apps on the app stores. However, the fleex.tv website is 100% responsive and is your go-to place to use fleex from any mobile device. Note that the level of features you’ll get access to may depend on the device you’re using:

• On mobile phones, you’ll be able to access you video history, your vocabulary lists and exercises
• On tablets, you’ll also be able to watch webseries and TED Talks

Outside of mobile, on your desktop computer and as you probably already know, you’ll also be able to watch Netflix videos and local video files, using our Fleex for Netflix extension for Google Chrome as well as Fleex player.

Looks like you're receiving a "Do Not Honor" error with code 2000:

2000: Do Not Honor
The customer's bank is unwilling to accept the transaction. The customer will need to contact their bank for more details regarding this generic decline.

The problem might be with AVS (address verification), though please note that AVS isn't generally used outside the US. Calling your bank, however cumbersome that is (very sorry for the trouble), is probably your best chance to figure out what's going wrong...

Looks like you're receiving a "Transaction Not Allowed" error with code 2015:

2015: Transaction Not Allowed
The customer's bank is declining the transaction for unspecified reasons, possibly due to an issue with the card itself. They will need to contact their bank or use an alternative payment method.

Long story short, your bank is refusing to authorize the transaction - unfortunately, we ignore the reason behind that refusal. Without any further information, I see no option other than contacting your bank to ask them the reason they're blocking the transaction. We are of course very sorry for the trouble, and hope that you can find a solution with your bank!

Looks like you're receiving a "Processor Declined" error with code 2038:

2038: Processor Declined
The customer's bank is unwilling to accept the transaction. The reasons for this response can vary – customer will need to contact their bank for more details.

Same answer as for "Do Not Honor" errors: the problem might be with AVS (address verification), though AVS isn't generally used outside the US. Calling your bank, however cumbersome that is, is probably your best chance to figure out what's going wrong.