Flowplayer / Blog

Working full time on FlowPlayer now!

06/26/2008, api

I started developing FlowPlayer back in 2005. The first version was quite limited but enough to attract a few downloads per day in Sourceforge. That was enough for me to continue adding new features and enhancing it. I started releasing new versions at a constant pace and we have continued this tradition to this day.

Nowadays FlowPlayer is "the most versatile video player in the Internet today" (a quote from a satisfied user) and it gets more than thousand downloads per day. This success has made it possible for me to quit my day-job and to work full-time in this project! This has been my dream a long time and I'm really happy about the situation.

I'm now dividing my time in supporting the FlowPlayer commercial license owners, in the maintenance of the currect 2.x version, and in the development of our upcoming V3 release. The support requests get immediate action nowadays and the V3 development has gotten a significant boost.

FlowPlayer has a second almost-full-time developer Tero who has been in the project for about half a year now. Tero has been key in making the recent success of this project a reality - he is the author of our JavaScript tools and is also responsible of the looks of this site. He is now working on the JavaScript parts of our V3 version, and on the next version of this site.

All is well in the FlowPlayer-land and I'm excited to see what the future brings!

New release of Flashembed: 0.29

06/10/2008, tipiirai

source code now passes JSLint: http://www.jslint.com
updated documentation. it should be now (even) more readable
packed, minified and gzipped versions are now available
second argument can be passed as string when it is itepreted as "src" option. this makes the tool more readable
lazy loading was removed because it should be implemetned outside this tool for making more modularized code

Go to Flashembed project page.

Bugfix relase 2.2.1 is out

06/03/2008, api

Version 2.2.1 fixes some issues that were left lurking in 2.2:

initialVolumePercentage did not affect the volume level before the slider was touched
non-HW full-screen did not scale the video up when the menu was hidden
pauses the player before opening the page linked with the clip specific linkUrl variable
the controlBar's playbutton did not work after pressing stop or after rewinding to beginning
controlsOverVideo: 'no' was fixed, now it's again possible to have the controls locked below the video area
Fixed SWF viewing, in some cases the SWF was left invisible.

Thanks for everyone who participated in this by reporting bugs!

Version 2.2 is out

05/28/2008, api

We are pleased to announce that Flowplayer 2.2 has been released. This is a new feature release that adds following:

New JavaScript tools to create playlists and to easily embed several videos into your site. We also have new tutorials for these JavaScript tools.
Added possibility to pause/resume using the space bar
Added initialVolumePercentage configuration variable
The clips specific start property is now supported with lighttpd
Changed to use the new Google Analytics pageTracker._trackPageview function to send the stats.
New version 0.28 of flashembed.js - our flash embedding tool. Fixed to properly detects Flash player version 10.

JavaScript API enhancements:

Added getVersion() function
Added new showEmailView() and showEmbedView() functions
Added possibility to disable player's default behavior related to the event callbacks. This utilized by our new flow.playlist tool and you can utilize it in your own scripting.
getIsPlaying() now returns false if the player is paused

Fixes:

The play button is now enabled at the end of the clip when loop: false, autoRewind: false
Looping through adjacent streams now works properly when using a RTMP server.
Suggestion thumbnails fell out of alignment if they were of differing widths.
There was no sound when video clips don't contain metadata or when using RTMP live streams.
Volume slider now mutes the volume completely when dragged to the left end.

Thanks again for everyone involved in testing this and giving us feedback!

Flowplayer receives an award!

05/17/2008, api

We are proud to tell you that Flowplayer has been was awarded today and included in the list of software in uptodown.com. Uptodown.com team of editors test all programs and write a review on those which are thought to be really useful. After this review, they decided to award Flowplayer, and it will be highlighted from the rest of software in the same category at uptodown.com.

Here's a link to our page at uptodown.com. I just hope they had an english version of the site so I would better understand what they are saying.

Flowplayer 2.1.3 is out

04/25/2008, api

Version 2.1.3 is out now! This is a bug-fix release that includes following:

New version 0.27 of flashembed.js - our flash embedding tool
Commercial versions: Added a possibility to have a custom Overlay Play Button image. New config option playButtonImageUrl to achieve this. (There's going to be a demo/screenshot showing this soon.)

Fixes:

noVideoClip option was not working with playOverlay (play button overlay)
progress bar was not visible in IE after a page refresh
Now it really stops at the first frame when setting autoPlay: false, autoBuffering: false

Thanks again for everyone involved in testing this and giving us feedback! We are going to make the 2.x branch as stable as possible while at the same time implementing new and exciting stuff for the 3.0 release.

Playing H.264 encoded files from Wowza

04/13/2008, api

Wowza Media Server 1.5 preview contains support for streaming H.264 encoded videos (mp4, mpeg etc.). I wanted to see how it works with Flowplayer. I downloaded the preview from the Wowza site and installed it to my desktop machine. It turns out that it works great! Here is the required player configuration:


{ streamingServer: 'fms', streamingServerURL: 'rtmp://localhost/fastplay', videoFile: 'mp4:Extremists.m4v' }

fastplay is the Wowza application offering the streams and Extremists.m4v is an example video file contained by the Wowza distribution. I had to create the fastplay directory to the Wowza's applications dir to make things work. Note that the mp4: prefix has to be present in the videoFile for Wowza to recognize that this is a H.264 encoded stream.

The Wowza preview also contains support for live streams encoded in H.264/AAC. I just need to find a way to encode a live stream from a webcam or a DV cam to start testing this. Anyone know of good encoders that work on Linux (please add a comment if you do)? Anyway, this stuff looks really interesting!

Simple playlist as a scripting example

04/12/2008, tero

Following things just happened to for Flowplayer scripters

a new section about scripting under documentation section
a simple JavaScript based playlist implementation
new version of flashembed.js that introduces a simple method of getting handle to the Flash object's API.

Flowplayer 2.1.2 is out

04/10/2008, api

Version 2.1.2 is available now. This is mainly a bug-fix release and here is a list of issues fixed:

New example.html page included in the distribution package. This example is the same that we have in our updated installation instructions.
New version of Flashembed embedding tool, containing bug fixes.
Sometimes the buffering animation was left running in the beginning of videos. This does not happen any more.
Video scaling problems were fixed. You can use the config option showOnLoadBegin: false to prevent a clip from showing before it hase been scaled to the configured size setting.

Thanks for everyone who helped us in testing and by giving feedback!

Flowplayer ads discontinued

04/02/2008, api

We have decided to stop working on the Flowplayer AdServer project and to concentrate on the player instead. We want to make the best possible video player and direct all our resources to the player development.

We have ambitious plans for the new Flowplayer 3 that is scheduled to go out later this year. The player will be completely rewritten and there will be a high support for both JavaScript and ActionScript 3.0 languages to help in extending and scripting the core player. To make this all happen we need to focus our resources - There are two core developers now working on this project.

This does not mean that Flowplayer will not support video advertising. Quite the opposite - Our goal is that the player will be compatible with different advertising networks and platforms by the aid of our becoming plugin architecture. But we will not build our own video advertising platform and publisher/advertiser network like we announced a while back.

New release

04/02/2008, api

Flowplayer 2.1 was released yesterday. Here's a briefing of the new things included.

Hardware scaling

You can now configure the player to use hardware scaling in the full-screen mode. Hardware scaling is supported by the newest Flash plugins and it performs scaling using the client computer's video adapter. This should produce smoother and CPU-friendly full-screen video performance. Together with high quality H264 encoded video the results can be stunning.

One interesting angle with this is that Flash scales everything using the same ratio. This ratio is determined by how much scaling is needed to stretch the video to fill the whole screen and this same ratio is also applied to scale Flowplayer's control bar. If a lot of scaling is applied the control bar could appear quite big. A big control bar is handy when the users view the full-screen video from a distance.

The demos in our site's front page have all been configured to use hardware scaling. Click the full-screen button in the player to see how it looks.

Glossy skin

There's now some gloss applied to the player's skin. Take a look at our updated screenshots page to see how it looks. A configuration option can be used to select between a strong and a mild gloss effect. You can also remove the gloss and after that it will look the same as with version 2.0.

The buffering animation (the rotating circle shown in the center of the player) was replaced with a new better looking one. Also the play button overlay has been changed to a better looking one.

New Flashembed

A new version of our Flash embedding script is also available. Flashembed does not need jQuery any more and it's usage has been simplified - embedding the player is really easy and straightforward. Flashembed is also now included in the distribution package and the included example HTML pages have been updated to use it.

Minor additions and bug fixes

In addition to these new features some bugs were fixed. Here is a partial list issues fixed:

The control bar hiding is now based on mouse move delay, works much better that way. Now you can properly use the control bar also with easing turned on with controlsOverVideo: 'ease'
onFlowPlayerReady() JavaScript API function is called also when you use the configInject option.
Does not show NaN's in the time display when playing MP3 clips with autoPlay: false
The stop button now behaves correctly with MP3 clips.
Replay button in the suggestions view fixed. Now it actually replays the video.
Does not produce sound in the beginning of clip when autoPlay: false and autoBuffering: true.
Now shows the first frame of video when autoPlay: false and autoBuffering: true
Setting clip's duration just using the end parameter now works.
Does not show the buffering rotation animation unnecessarily at the end of playList.

An archive of old blog posts can be found in our community site.