TruePseudo HTTP Streaming plugin for Flash® player

What is it?

HTTP streaming plugin for Flash is a small piece of software that is embedded in a web page (does not require installation) with your Flash video player. It allows to stream your H264 videos in mp4 or flv containers from pretty much any http web server like Apache to a Flash video player providing your visitors with seeking functionality. Ultimately the plugin allows you to use single http server and single version of a video file (H264 in a mp4 container) to delivery to any device (using html5 video tag for mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, Androids and Flash video player with the streaming plugin for desktops ) providing seeking functionality.

Why HTTP streaming for Flash ?

• seek to a point in time without need to wait
• nothing to install (easy to use on a shared hosting or with CDN)
• use single http server and single version of video files (H264 mp4) to stream to any device
• stream a video from multiple locations simultaneously
• easily passes through firewalls
• seamlessly supports videos with moov atom coming after mdat atom

HTTP streaming plugin comes in different flavours depending on what popular Flash video player you use:

• Flowplayer
• Strobeplayer

Known limitations

• requires http range requests capable server (most of the servers and CDNs are)
• requires Flash player version 10.1 or later on the client side
• videos spec: H264 in mp4 or flv container; mp4 must have key-frames (this is set up during video encoding); flv must have key-frames metadata
• where the plugin is embedded in a page with different top level domain ( the page url is http://first.com and the video is delivered from http://second.com) AND the visitor uses Internet Explorer 7 or earlier speed problems are likely to occur.