
Help
Videos
Help
Videos
This guide refers to advanced video publishing use cases. For standard video publishing please see our basic guide here.
To publish a video in Flowplayer and take advantage of the most advanced use cases you need two things:
You have three options for how to host and make the video files available for playback in Flowplayer:
Below is an overview of the different options:
We always recommend that you upload your video file to Flowplayer and let us take care of the encoding to ensure that you benefit from flawless playback on every screen and also take advantage of our optimized CDN to ensure flawless playback across all networks in the world. Learn how to publish videos in this way.
We also offer you the possibility to host video files yourself in case it is more practical for you. A common case is if you already have a very large and properly encoded media library stored in the cloud and don’t want to move the files to Flowplayer. In this case you can host your video file yourself either as a remote video. You publish a remote video exactly like a normal video.
By adding your assets as remote video assets in Flowplayer you will get analytics with the video assets and can take advantage of other functionality in Flowplayer such as metadata handling and playlists but can still keep the files stored in your server and hosted using your CDN. In addition you benefit from automatic upgrades and improved ways of handling video sources in the video player as we take care and optimize the loading of assets across different platforms.
In case you want to host the video files yourself, but do not want any of the features listed with remote videos, you are free to only use the player and load your source files directly into the player. Publish a player and configure it with your sources.
Video analytics are available for videos hosted by us and for remote video assets, ie if they are registered in our system and you embed them using the platform src id
. External videos without a Flowplayer src id
cannot be tracked. Do not embed the video urls directly!
If you embed with the pure Javascript embed, you must also load the platform integration plugin.
Each time you publish a video in Flowplayer you need a player profile to go with it. In case you do not make a choice of the player profile we will automatically select your default profile as the base setup.
MP4 videos should be real MPEG-4 part 10 resp. h264 videos in an MP4 container. Make sure your encoder does not create MPEG-4 part 2 aka h263, which will not play in all browsers. The audio track should be AAC rather than MP3.
H.264 encoded videos carry their metadata — duration, frame rate etc. — in the so called "moov atom".
By default encoding programs will insert the moov atom at the end of the video file which is suitable for playback of a local file in a desktop program. However, any kind of progressive download requires the metadata to be available right away for immediate playback. Otherwise the player has to wait for the entire video to be downloaded before playback starts.
Make sure to select an option in your transcoding program which puts the moov atom at the beginning of the file!
In case you already have a lot of MP4 videos with the moov atom at the end of the file, use a dedicated program such as QTIndexSwapper or MOOV Relocator to move it to the beginning.
The video streams must be served with a cross domain policy (CORS) allowing GET requests. If the segments are not static files, but are retrieved via byte-range requests HEAD and OPTIONS must be allowed as well.
Sample CORS Configuration for Amazon S3:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<CORSConfiguration xmlns="http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/">
<CORSRule>
<AllowedOrigin>*</AllowedOrigin>
<AllowedMethod>GET</AllowedMethod>
<!-- only required for byte-range based retrieval -->
<AllowedMethod>HEAD</AllowedMethod>
<MaxAgeSeconds>3000</MaxAgeSeconds>
<AllowedHeader>*</AllowedHeader>
</CORSRule>
</CORSConfiguration>
For other server configurations, please check enable-cors.org .
Make sure that all the files are available on the server (avoid redirects) and that the server transmits them with the correct Content-Type
header. Depending on your server you might have to extend the .htaccess
or mime.types
files (Apache), use the IIS manager (Internet Information Server) or set the header via Metadata (Amazon S3). Example .htaccess
file:
## video types
AddType application/x-mpegurl .m3u8
AddType video/mp4 .mp4
AddType video/webm .webm
AddType application/dash+xml .mpd
## hls transport stream segments:
AddType video/mp2t .ts
## subtitle text tracks:
AddType text/vtt .vtt
For nginx, the MIME type is defined in nginx/conf/mime.types In lighthttps, use the config file
In Amazon S3 you need to give the content type as a parameter to the AWS cli
or s3cmd
when uploading a file, or adapt it in the metadata section of each file when it's already uploaded.
It is hightly recommended to serve all files with https
. Never mix protocols!
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