Flowplayer technical facts Where does this player work properly
Flash version 9.0.0
Flowplayer is written in ActionScript 3.0 which is supported by Flash versions 9 and above. According to this document this version covers around 97.7% of all the Flash installations (June 2008). This is quite the same as for Flash 8 versions which is 98.7%. From all the internet viewers Flash content reaches 99% according to this so you can be quite relaxed when serving videos with Flowplayer.
When looking at Google analytics on flowplayer.org site those numbers seem to be quite accurate. Version 8 is indeed used around 1% of the users.
When lower version is detected flowplayer automatically uses express install to upgrade Flash to latest version. You really don't have to configure anything.
Supported browsers
Flowplayer API and JavaScript plugins are dependent on JavaScript 1.5 which is supported by following browsers.
- Internet Explorer 6.0+
- Firefox FF 2+
- Safari 2.0+
- Opera 9.0+
According to these browser statistics nearly 98% of all browsers are covered by those given the fact that under 1% of flowplayer.org users are using Firefox 1+. The biggest problem seems to be fact that 5% of users have disabled JavaScript support. The workaround for this is to install Flowplayer using standard OBJECT tag without JavaScript. Instructions can be found here. You'll loose the ease of use and high configuration possibilities.
Supported video formats
| format | description | advantages | disadvantages |
|---|---|---|---|
| FLV | Most played video format on the web. YouTube and Google Videos are using it . | Basically all clients with Flash capability can see these videos. Has been there since version 6. | Referred to a proprietary file format and does not offer as good video and audio quality as H.264 does. |
| H.264 | A video compression standard. | Provides good video quality at lower bit rates than FLV. As a standard it is not Apple's proprietary format. | Supported since Flash version 9.115 which is used by 81.7% of all Flash users according to this document |
| MP4 | a video compression standard that is a subset of the whole H.264 standard family | same advantages as in H.264 | There seems to be many different flavors of MP4 and only some of them are supported by Flash. You can always try a given file to see if it plays in Flowplayer, if it does not the most likely reason is that it is not compatible with Flash. |
If you have a video file on your hard disk that is not in the list of supported formats you'll have to convert it. Here is an tutorial about video conversion.