I'm often asked, "I see a lot of sites putting movies up on the web. They seem to be in FLV format. What the heck is an FLV file and what plays them back?" Here is some vague information to get you started. I'm too lazy to research the details definitively right now.
FLV is a "Flash Video" file. It is a format that is designed for web playback, offering high rates of compression. Several products output in FLV format, including Sorenson Squeeze (I think Sorensen developed the FLV format and Macromedia licenses it). (The term "movie" often refers to common Flash source files (.FLA) and deployed files (.SWF) and is not synonymous with "video").
The Flash Player browser plugin can play an FLV, but that FLV, to my knowledge, must be either embedded in or linked to a SWF. That is, you can't just put the FLV on an HTML page, me thinks. You can check if something is running in Flash Player on Windows by right-clicking on the content. If the pop-up contextual menu says "About Macromedia Flash Player 7" then you know it is running inside Flash Player. On the Mac, I think you need to Ctrl-click since there is no right mouse button.
You need Flash Player 6 or later, I believe, to play an FLV inside a SWF. Flash Player 7 (the current version) can also provide "progressive download" of external FLV files, which is not quite the same as streaming. For true streaming, you need FlashCom Server on the server side (and either Flash Player 6 or 7 on the client side). Or I guess there might be thrid-party imitators.
Macromedia also sells a "Flash Video Kit" for Dreamweaver, which I believe creates the SWF for you. It also compresses the FLV using Sorensen Squeeze Lite.
Anyway, this is all explained in the Preface to "Programming Flash Communication Server". Also see the chapter on video in that book for more info about the tools to create FLV files.
Happy FLVing!
posted on Tue, 03 May 2005 at 10:41 | path: /multimedia | perma link
