MP4 not working, but .FLV is working fine

GenieB

I am using 1.4.2.4. Zenpage Theme

I noticed with 1.4.2.3 and now the latest upgrade that flowplayer is stalling on the MP4. The FLV's are playing fine.
What could cause one to play and not the other?

Should I be able to drop a .webm in the album and see the file, yet? I don't even see the presence of the file.

Thanks

acrylian

Flowplayer does not support webm (see flowplayer.org). Webm is a special format only supported by Opera, Chrome and Firefox (and only via HTML5) as far as I know. Flowplayer supports what Flash supports.

flv and mp4 are not really formats/codecs but containers. They can contain various codecs and settings of those. Not all work. Try standard settings of these.

GenieB

As for settings, I do not set anything. I'm not even sure what you are meaning. But the problem seems to be intermittent now.

As for WEBM, I understand Google is supporting it, and nearly every new video on YouTube is now coming in that format. I've also read that Adobe is gearing up for it, too.

Looks like i'ts not going to go away anytime soon, according to wikipedia.

==========
Native WebM support by Mozilla Firefox, Opera,and Google Chrome was announced at the 2010 Google I/O conference. Internet Explorer 9 requires third-party WebM software.[11] Safari for Windows and Mac OS X relies on QuickTime to play web media,[12] which as of 1 April 2011, does not support WebM[13][14] unless a third-party plug-in is installed.[15] In January 2011, Google announced that the WebM Project Team will release plugins for Internet Explorer and Safari to allow playback of WebM files through the standard HTML5 <video> tag. As of 1 April 2011, a public preview version of this plug-in is available for Internet Explorer 9.

Adobe Systems announced that its Flash Player will be updated to support WebM, but no exact date was specified for its addition.

Media players such as VLC, Miro, and Winamp, have announced support. MPlayer has native support for playing WebM files. FFmpeg can now encode and decode VP8 videos when built with libvpx support, as well as mux/demux WebM-compliant files. On 23 July 2010, Jason Garrett-Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpeg team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder. mkvtoolnix, the popular Matroska creation tools, have implemented support for Multiplexing/Demultiplexing WebM-compliant files out of the box.Haali Media Splitter has also announced support for muxing/demuxing of WebM.[29] As of version 1.4.9, the LiVES video editor has support for realtime decoding and for encoding to WebM format using ffmpeg libraries.

acrylian

Again, Flowplayer is a video/audio player based on flash and does not support webm. No matter what you do.

mp4 and flv can be encoded in different ways and flash can be picky. Again check the codecs and the sizes.

Except Chrome, Opera and Firefox no other browser will be able to play these natively. You will need therefore a extra format for those browsers (IE, Safari). You cannot expect normal visitors to install yet another plugin. They won't and won't even know about. Flash most likely anyone has (though Flowplayer requires 10 or 11). See its site.

If you use Chrome on Youtube and get webm that is normal, but on other browser you will most likey get either a flashfall back with mp4 or in case of Safari a native html5 mp4 player.

Try the jplayer plugin if you wish to use it. But also here you need several formats to serve all browsers:
http://jplayer.org/latest/developer-guide/#reference-html5-media

This is all not that easy because they all do their own things. Welcome to the browser wars.

GenieB

I see, I think. Thank you.

So, if I download a video from Youtube with IE, the format will be different than if I use FF.

Yes, browser wars and the final answer on video formats.

And now, we have to write for all the screen sizes. GAK!