Forum user: Virgil

After encoding an MP4, you usually need to rearrange the headers to allow it to use progressive downloading. The most common utility for this is qt-faststart, which is generally included with ffmpeg, but there are a number of other ones as well.

Do a search for "mp4 progressive download" and you should find a few dozen solutions.

This may or may not be intentional, but it is a slightly odd problem.

Through experimentation, I found that passing a playerId parameter in the player config is necessary to access the player API without using flowplayer.js to load the player (which I can't do, for various reasons). By passing in a playerId, which the JavaScript loader does on its own, the function hooks in flowplayer can then be used sith standard JavaScript calls, even when the player is embedded using a standard object tag.

Once this parameter is passed in, Flowplayer compares the commercial key in the config against the domain of the page hosting the player, and not against the domain hosting the player. Hence, any videos embedded on other sites (in blog posts and whatnot) begin showing as unregistered versions.

Yes and no. For remote embedding in most places, you cannot use JavaScript. One of my least favorite things about Flowplayer is the constant focus on using jQuery to load, embed, and control the player throughout the documentation. Do not want.

But with some work it is definitely possible to generate embed codes without JavaScript, and with the external configurations you can generate much smaller ones.

Here's the code I use on my site:

<embed src="http//[yourhost]/flowplayer.swf" flashvars="config=[url]" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http//www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" width="480" height="294" wmode="opaque"></embed>

I removed the : from the URLs in the embed code, because the auto-linking on this site completely breaks them.

The way this works is that it loads a copy of Flowplayer which uses an external configuration file that is unique for each video (it's dynamically generated from a database on our site). That configuration file has everything that the player needs to play the video, including the plugin configuration and the playlist info. The only configuration other than that in the embed code is the width and height of the player, which need to be in the object tag.

Since it's just a basic object tag at this point it should be able to be embedded anywhere that supports them. You will need to generate and provide the embed code to your users on your own though, as Flowplayer will not generate it for you.

I'd like to see this as well - I noticed that the Ooyala player that EA is using seems to have this functionality.

Here's an example:http://www.pandemicstudios.com/thesaboteur/node

If you use Firebug (or something similar) to watch your browser requests you can see that there are actually several video files being used for a single trailer, but for the end user it is completely transparent.

We currently use a solution that allows us to stitch multiple video files together into a single output file, but I would much rather be able to use multiple files and a playlist if this was a possibility.

It would be nice if the player passed some version info to the external configuration file. Ideally both the version of Flowplayer and Flash. That way the returned configuration file could be adjusted based on the features available, even for embedded videos. For example, making sure we only serve FLVs to Flash versions that don't support H.264 video.

For example, if the request for the configuration file had a User Agent like: Flowplayer (3.1.1; 10.0.32.18). Or if that info was added as a GET request to the config file URL.

While we can do some detection of features when the page is written, that won't work for players embedded in other sites, especially older versions.

What I'm doing is dynamically generating the config files for each video. The nice advantage here, and the main reason I'm doing it that way, is that you can change the location of the video file without needing to change the embed code or breaking already-existing external embeds.

Here's our embed tag:

<embed src=http://static.themis-media.com/media/global/movies/player/flowplayer.commercial-3.1.1.swf" flashvars="confighttp://www.themis-media.com/videos/config/813-0d085741874f761128d055ad81bb34a5.js" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" quality="high" bgcolor="#000000" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage=http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" width="480" height="294" wmode="opaque"></embed>

You can see the generated configuration file here:http://www.themis-media.com/videos/config/813-0d085741874f761128d055ad81bb34a5.js

I know it's not exactly what you're looking for, but hopefully it can at least give you a place to start. I'm also using an embed tag instead of an object tag, but it should be simple to change the tag and arguments to your preference.

One thing to note is that the width and height of the player need to be specified in the HTML, not in the configuration, so at least some configuration is still needed in the base tag.

Edit: The code tag seems to be munging up some of the embed code, but you can grab a copy here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/rebecca-mayes-muses/813-The-Sims-3

Hello Anssi,

I just updated our site to use the newest Flowplayer/Liverail combo, and I'm not sure if this crept back into Flowplayer or if it's something in the new Liverail plugin, but it seems to be happening again.

Running AdBlock Plus with the standard filters will cause the Flowplayer to hang before the control bar, and without loading the playlist. I'm going to contact Liverail directly about the problem, but I thought I'd let you know as well.

Edit: Just noticed that this also happens on the Liverail demo page on the Flowplayer site:http://flowplayer.org/plugins/advertising/liverail.html

Did this make it into the new release? I checked the updated documentation and the changelog for 3.1 and didn't see a mention of it.

To help support LiveRail you added support for remotely hosted plugins into 3.0.3

One problem I've run into is that if the user can't connect to the domain hosting a plugin (DNS issues or server failure, for example) the player stops loading completely.

If possible, it would be preferable if the player could recover from a failed plugin load and still continue on to try to play the video.

OK, after installing the debug build and some more experimentation, I think we've narrowed down the problem. Here's the debug info:

Error: Error #2134: Cannot create SharedObject.
	at flash.net::SharedObject$/getLocal()
	at org.flowplayer.controller::VolumeController/restoreVolume()
	at org.flowplayer.controller::VolumeController()
	at MediaControllerFactory()
	at PlayState$/initStates()
	at org.flowplayer.controller::PlayListController/set http://flowplayer.org/core/internal::playerEventDispatcher()
	at org.flowplayer.view::Launcher/createFlowplayer()
	at org.flowplayer.view::Launcher/initPhase2()
	at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEventFunction()
	at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent()

The problem appears to be that the user had the Flash setting "Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer" turned off.

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html

I'm actually not sure if this is something that can be worked around, but maybe it's possible to check in advance and throw an error message to that effect.

The user has it happening under Mac Safari and Firefox, and Windows IE and Firefox on different machines. Both users are using the latest version of Flash - I had them reinstall the latest version as the first step in troubleshooting.

One user took a screenshot:http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v724/vippin/zeropunc.jpg

It seems to happen after the canvas background loads, but before the control bar or the rest of the plugins initialize.

The problem is you're using a relative path to your video in the configuration, and Flash is trying to load the following URL:http://esimple.de/example/play-tutorial.php/flv/tutorial_wf_archetype_subtitled.avi.FLV

Note the PHP script in there.

Change your FlowPlayer configuration to have the full URL and it will probably work. If you want the page to be fully portable, use PHP to generate the URL based on the request.

I was using the 3.0.3-dev3 version. Yesterday I updated to the 3.0.3 release version and while the behavior is the same, there is no longer any error message displayed. I'm not sure if the different versions provide different levels or error output.

I've also gotten a second user reporting the same problem since then.

The player can be seen athttp://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/unskippable/500-Dead-Rising - but it will likely work perfectly fine for you.

I've asked one of the users to install the Flash debug build to get a stack trace of the error.

I'm not sure what is causing this error, but one particular user is having it on multiple different machines (with different operating systems, and on multiple browsers). It would seem like it's connection-dependent, but I'm not sure what it could be. Perhaps the error message can narrow down where it's happening.

300: player initialization failed: failed in phase2: error #2134

I found one old thread on this in this forum, but there didn't seem to be a resolution. The player seems to be working the rest of the time though, as it's live and working for everyone else (as far as I can tell, that is).

Here's my feature request - I'd like to be able to tell the player to load the full configuration from a URL.

The example of an 'embedded' config doesn't help in this case because I need the player to be embeddable on other sites, and many cannot include Javascript. While the JavaScript plugins are nice enough, they're just not practical for this purpose.

I can write out the full configuration into the embed code (and am currently), but if we end up using plugins to handle advertising it's too easy to just remove it from the embedded config to strip them out.

If the player could load the config from a URL, my embed code would be drastically shorter, and I could point it to a dynamically generated page to generate the playlists and plugins.