introducing
flowplayer setup
The new, lightweight Setup is Flowplayer’s answer to expensive and complex video delivery systems. Your very own customized player is hosted on a global streaming network, and plays the video from your hard disk. A task that usually consumes copious amounts of time and money, or is simply impossible, can now be completed in minutes.
Your pimped player
You can tweak every aspect of the player. Change the logo, play with the look and feel of the controls, hide all or part of it. Preview your changes in real-time – no coding required. Your fully-modded player is then compiled for you into a single file for faster download.
Commercial license owners can have one or more product keys inside the player to make the player logo-free on a single or multiple domains. Your product key, as well as all your other configuration options, are kept protected and private, separate from the HTML code. It’s your very own, pimped video player!
Global streaming for a global audience
The brains behind the beauty of your player? Our global streaming network service, HDDN. No matter where a user is located on the globe, your video will be served from the closest possible server using the latest streaming technologies – automatically.
Unlike other networks with rented server space, HDDN uses only the latest in dedicated streaming servers (Wowza 2.0 and lighttpd). Their worldwide network of servers guarantees your content will be in direct reach of users in 90+ countries. And your video content will be in good company: HDDN's superior performance record has made them the trusted choice for demanding sites, such as mozilla.com.
Any format goes
Your original video file can be in any format, and located on your local hard disk or on a web server. Setup converts your video to a web-friendly format for you, with no extra time or effort on your part. The file is then served globally, automatically.
This is just a beginning
After the initial setup, you can super-pimp your player with more advanced features: playlists, sharing, analytics and bandwidth detection. Check out our demo area for more ideas and inspiration.
introducing
flowplayer 3.2
Our philosophy: the user interface should not get in the way of the user experience. The video is the star of the show here; the player simply supports it.
Modern skin
Because the user is watching the video, not the player, our new lightweight skin has been optimized for autohiding. When the skin is shown, though, it should have a look that is uniquely yours. With the new Setup tools, you can modify every single aspect of the skin to give it a look that is all your own.
The real purpose of the player, of course, is to deliver your video content smoothly and seamlessly to your audience. Flowplayer 3.2 does this with fine-grained bandwidth detection, and seamless integration with the special HDDN video streaming network.
Transparency control
While designing our new skin, we realized the necessity for more transparency options. You often need to hide the background only, not the control bar elements. This is why we implemented RGBA (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha) support for all individual control bar elements. With the new Setup, it is easy to experiment with this new feature. And, as always, the skinning syntax follows the CSS standard.
Smooth as silk
We have put a lot of effort into optimizing the player to perform smoothly when in playback mode or when the user interacts with the controls. The timeline animates fluidly, and we have two different autohiding modes: ”fade” and ”slide”.
Flowplayer 3.2 supports two different keyboard layouts: YouTube-compatible arrow keys, and VIM-compatible arrow keys (HJKL) for the hardcore nerds. Spacebar toggles between play and pause, just like before.
Slow Motion
Ever seen slow motion video on the web? The wait is over: Flowplayer now does it. This requires some clever co-operation with the server. The latest Wowza server is the first to support this feature, with Flowplayer enabling it on the client side. We've added new control bar buttons and keyboard shortcuts for both slow motion and fast forward.
Viral Videos
The Viral Videos plugin allows you to spread your videos on the net like a virus (a friendly virus, that is). Your videos can be embedded by other sites; and from there, they can be embedded by yet more sites.
You can also email your video or share it with the most popular social media services to take advantage of the exponential virus effect. Plus, the appearance and the behavior of this plugin are configurable.
Google Analytics
Want to keep track of your video playback? The Analytics feature not only does this for your site, but for the virally-embedded players as well. We are using the brand new Google Event tracking, now officially out of beta.
The plugin can track all player events, such as start, pause, resume, finish or fullscreen, as well as the video location and duration of the playback.
Bandwidth detection
Ideally, you want the best available video experience with the least amount of network traffic. This is made possible by our intelligent bandwidth detection plugin. The bitrate adjusts dynamically based on the connection speed. Previously available for Adobe Flash Media server, the support has now been extended to Wowza.
The plugin will attempt to switch to a larger bandwidth when going to fullscreen mode, while taking care to not switch to a resolution too large to fit the screen. Standardized loading of the bitrate information from an XML file is also supported.
