"FlowPlayer" Free Web FLV Palyer, Easy to use and Free

Create Custom Skins

Our Tube skin is just one example skin that can be created with our new skinning framework. Creating new skins is easier than ever – you can do them in a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) manner with Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. And now with 3.1 you are no longer restricted to any fixed skin and you can go wild and create any look and feel you can imagine.

With just a little work you are able to create a personalized player and benefit from all of Flowplayer’s goodies such as configuration, plugin framework, the best streaming support and our revolutionary scripting API.

Learn the details of creating controlbar skins.

Tooltips

We now have tooltips. By default they are enabled for the timeline scrubber and for the volume slider. Additionally you can enable tooltips for all other controlbar elements if you like. Tooltip texts can be customized or localized and tooltip colors and appearance can be changed. You can try the tooltips in the example player shown above or you can take a look at our tooltips demo.

JavaScript controlbar

We definitely haven’t forgotten our JavaScript based controlbar. Our new updated version has a mute button and a time display, both of which have been requested by our users. Due to its ability to be customized with standard HTML/CSS technologies, it will be one of the most important plugins in Flowplayer. Here is one example skin called “Hulu”

Skinning Documentation

We have a new skinning documentation area. It covers a wide variety of different skinning possibilities from CSS-based container skinning to Flash background images.

Streaming Extensions

We take streaming seriously. Once we perfected MP4 pseudostreaming, it was time for a giant leap: streaming extensions. Streaming extensions are plugins that can be used to change the way the player creates a connection to the streaming server. The following new plugins are available and they all support http, pseudostreaming and RTMP:

Bandwidth detection

The new bwcheck plugin is capable of calculating the user’s connection speed before selecting a video file for streaming.

Users with better connection speeds are served with higher quality videos (larger file size) and users with lower connection speeds are served with lesser quality videos (smaller files). You can serve any amount of different video qualities for different connection speeds.

This plugin was contributed by Daniel Rossi.

Dynamic switching

The bwcheck plugin can switch streams even during the playback! This means that the user is always served with the best possible video quality without any gaps in the playback. This requires server-side support and at the moment only the Adobe Flash Media Server provides support for this. Take a look at the dynamic switching live demo.

Secure streaming

Our securestreaming plugin is used to protect video files from being downloaded or ‘leeched’ from your site. People can only view your videos through the player. Server-side support is required and the plugin is compatible with lighttpd’s mod_secdownload module and Wowza’s secure token implementation as described in the documentation. Compatible, custom server-side implementations are relatively easy to implement too.

Clustering

This plugin offers the following:

• high availability via multiple servers in a cluster so that you have many streaming servers serving your video file. If one server fails another server can still provide the stream.
• scalability if your site begins to grow and more and more videos are requested you can add new streaming servers to your architecture. This plugin will “load balance” those servers so you can distribute the video streaming load evenly to each of those servers.

By using this plugin you are ready for “prime time”. Do you want to stream the Olympics?

This plugin was contributed by Daniel Rossi.

Flowplayer core

Many, many little changes and bug fixes. See a full list of changes from our version history

flowplayer.js: 5.8 Kb file size!

flowplayer-3.1.0.js is now minified using the YUI Compressor, reducing the file size roughly 25% which leads to a 15 Kb file size before gzip compression. When served with a gzip-enabled web server, the downloaded file size is only 5.5 Kb. Together with Flowplayer’s unique feature of initializing video players without any initial heavyweight Flash loading, by using splash images, your pages will work and load fast no matter how many video players you have installed on your page.

Handling of older Flash versions

When using Flowplayer, you can design and create sites for users that have older Flash versions or don’t have Flash installed at all. Here is what happens:

1. users without Flash or with a Flash version below 6.0.65 will be shown a shown HTML-based alternate content prompting them to upgrade to the latest Flash version. A direct link to the Flash download page is provided.
2. users with Flash versions above 6.0.65 and below 9.0.0 will be shown an Express Install option which performs an in-place Flash upgrade so they do not not leave your site when performing the install.

The same thing happens whether or not you have setup your player with an initial splash image.

OpenX advertising plugin (beta)

Flowplayer leads the way in Open Source video advertising. This plugin is sill in beta but we have a sneak preview available. This plugin is based on the following two major building blocks:

Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST)

VAST is a standard for video advertising. It is now being adopted by the major players on the market such as Double Click (owned by Google). This standard is based on XML and is meant to accommodate the majority of current practices within the online digital video advertising business.

OpenX – Open Source Ad server

OpenX is a free, Open Source ad server that manages the selling and delivery of your online advertising inventory. You can use OpenX as a hosted service or install it on your server. This software is growing by leaps and bounds under the leadership of the former CEO of AOL.

This Flowplayer advertising plugin will be released along with the new version of OpenX (2.8.1) which will support the VAST standard. This new plugin is definitely the way to go with Open Source based advertising. It is the only advertising plugin to support both VAST and OpenX – both of which are on solid ground in advertising. If you respect standards and Open Source software, then look no further. Check out our OpenX advertising plugin documentation.

Documentation and Demos

We have 20 new demos in our redesigned demo area. Our total number of demos is now 50. The demo area is now better organized and looks better. Here are some hot picks from the demo area:

• Streaming plugin extension demos (9)
• Placing HTML over the player
• Using a Flash component on the canvas
• Customizing controlbar tooltips
• Fixed postioning for the player
• Any Flash component as a plugin
• Loading plugins at runtime
• Using different screen size for different videos

Easier for non-programmers

We have updated our installation, configuration, JavaScript API and skinning sections in our documentation. These documents along with many other updates make our product much more accessible to non-programmers too.

Home page

You may have already seen our redesigned home page. The demos and content have been rewritten to highlight the current state of the player. Things have certainly changed since December 2008 when 3.0.0 was released.

As Flowplayer is being developed in Finland the language is not always perfect. There have been several people helping us to proof-read and correct the language. Thanks to Kenneth MacArthur, Christopher Vrooman and Paul Oglivie (API doc) for their good work.

Licensing

Our licensing terms and the license documents have been revised by David Bailey from Kauth, Pomeroy, Peck & Bailey LLP. David has a good deal of experience in intellectual property rights and Open Source licensing.He has helped to clarify our licenses so that we can protect our Flowplayer trademark while allowing people to benefit from Open Source licensing.

Commercial versions

We have lowered the prices for good. You can see the details in the following table:

Note that you can now pay in Euros. See more details about commercial versions from our new product details and purchase FAQ pages.

Free or Commercial. Get yourself the best video player for the web now!

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