Apple Media players?

[mik_s]

From what I can see those videos are being streamed on VLC so should work just fine. You still have them named .mp4 so can't tell if it will match to .m4v though but it should work just fine.

The 8Player does actually have a conf for it, sort-of.
There is a Apple-iDevice.conf that is a catch-all of several apps and basically says to not check and just stream everything.
This will also not catch anything that is not supported and also not send the right mime types some players might need to know what type of file it is.
The notes in that conf does say that its not working for 8player, but it is very old too so it will have had updates since then.

This should have the same effect as streaming on VLC but there is one difference that may help. See if this improves playback in VLC

Apple-iDevice-VLC.conf

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If you are streaming the videos then you should disable the resume feature. This is mainly for devices that can't remember the last playback position and needed to transcode videos to play. It does this by creating a virtual video you can play by transcoding from where it was left off (at least the last time I used it).

I don't know about the wrong thumbnails. I remember a problem with some TVs where they would cache the thumbnails, but as the IDs of the videos are generated each time by UMS there was no guarantee the thumbnail would be assigned to the right video.