Flowplayer Installation A step-by-step guide to showing videos in your web pages
Video formats
There are many video formats out on the web. Some formats are proprietary and require that company's player; other formats are open and many players can play them. As Flowplayer runs a Flash video object to play the files, the formats that Flowplayer supports are limited by the formats that Flash supports.
The formats that Flash supports are quite common on the net today and these formats gear towards making optimal use of bandwidth, so those are also often the preferred formats. But they are not all formats. If you have formats not supported by Flash you must either be prepared to load different players on your web page, depending on the format of the video to play, or convert the video to a Flash supported format. As multiple player types can be quite difficult, we limit this discussion to converting videos to a Flash supported format. The conversion will often make the file size smaller, which is essential for web videos.
The following file types can be played with Flash:
- .flv - These are Flash video files, as created by Adobe Media Encoder and other programs. Flash Video (.flv files) is a container format, meaning that it is not a video format in itself, but can contain other formats such as MPEG-4 or H.264.
- .f4v - These are standard mp4 files (MPEG-4) that can be played back by Flash Player 9 Update 3 and above.