CODEWITHSUNDEEP
flashvideo
bresson
bresson

Reputation: 901

Streaming Video Player

Its been two years since I built a video player and back then Flash was the only choice (just about). My question is if I want to stream a .h24 video over the web that is cross browser and platform compatible, has anything the ubiquity of Flash? How about Flowplayer?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 304

Answers (2)

Malyngo
Malyngo

Reputation: 893

Currently, your best bet is to still use Flash vor video playback, with a fallback to HTML5 video. (Or the other way around if you prefer to have Flash as the fallback)

Flowplayer itself also uses Flash for playback, but there are some plugins for Flowplayer, I think, that give you a HTML5 fallback. Might look around to see what you find.

If you want to code something yourself, for detection if Flash is installed, or if the browser supports HTML5 video playback, take a look at the Modernizr javascript library. That library makes it easy to check what things browsers support and what not.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: All the browsers I tested HTML5 video with can work with "Partial-content": If the video is still downloading and you jump forward in the video to a part that has not loaded yet, the browser will request the video from the point you jumped to, and you get pseudostreaming. The server the video is lying on just has to support Partial content (which both Apache and IIS do). So that is a huge plus to Flash, which still can't do that, after all those years.

Upvotes: 0

dain
dain

Reputation: 6689

It didn't get any simpler in the meanwhile :) As well as still having to support Flash playback to have cross-browser support on the desktop, you also have to separately take care of the iOS devices.

Flowplayer looks like a good solution and you can probably get away with only having MP4 format if you use that.

If you want to go down a purer HTML5 route, be prepared to maintain multiple encodings of every video as the browser vendors seem to torn between either MP4 or OGG.

Upvotes: 1

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