Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Does iPhone play flv files?

J

joshuajsmith

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 21, 2010
2
0
Hi All,

My question -

Will the iphone play .flv (flash video) files that are embedded in a website?

Background -

I created a website with a flash video, just using the standard methodology with Adobe Flash. It works fine when I view my website using a computer. However, using an iphone, there's just a blank space where the video would be.

Then a friend then told me that Apple purposely designed the iphone (and ipad) to *not* play flash video in websites - it only plays youtube videos. "But wait" said I, "youtube videos *are* flash video." Then said he "Even so, only youtube plays in a website, no other way." He said that the only way to have video embedded in my website is to put it on youtube and then embed the youtube link in my site.

Ughhh - could this be true?

Thank you,
Josh
 
Watabou

Watabou

macrumors 68040
Feb 10, 2008
3,425
755
United States
The iPhone can't play those files since it doesn't support flash. So for youtube, it plays a H264 version of the video. It doesn't use flash.

As for your website, you can also embed an HTML5 video and the iPhone will play that with no problems.
 
sammich

sammich

macrumors 601
Sep 26, 2006
4,305
268
Sarcasmville.
iOS doesn't not play any video that isn't MPEG2, 4 or H.264 or MJPEG.

Youtube videos have been specially converted into H.264.

Youtube embeds have changed slightly so that iOS will pick them up and display them differently.
 
scaredpoet

scaredpoet

macrumors 604
Apr 6, 2007
6,627
342
It's still possible to have your cake and eat it too.

What you'll need to do is encode your FLV videos as H.264 baseline MPEG-4 files, with a .mp4 extension. The same software you used to make the FLV should also make MP4 files. Or you can use a free package like handbrake, which has presets for iPod/iPhone video.

You can then embed this video on your website using JWPLayer, which is an HTML5 Video player witha Flash fallback. In other words, if you have an iPhone, iPad, or modern web browser that supports HTML5, it will play that way... if not, it'll use a traditional Flash player to playback the video.
 
J

joshuajsmith

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 21, 2010
2
0
Thanks for your replies.

Scaredpoet - your ideas re handbrake/jwplayer sound promising - I'll look into that.

I'm surprised that Apple would discard the Flash player - probably because Premier is cuttin' into FCP's profits...

Josh
 
M

M87

macrumors 65816
Jul 18, 2009
1,259
290
I've watched FLV files using third-party apps on my iPhone and iPad.
 
E

Enjoylife1788

macrumors 6502a
Aug 22, 2011
827
111
You can view videos of any format(almost) with third party apps like avplayer, oplayer. Have used both and both do justice to almost all the formats. have personally tested flv,avi and a few common ones.

IMO, Avplayer is better though.
 
Quotenfrau

Quotenfrau

macrumors 6502
Mar 6, 2011
461
14
Enjoylife1788 said:
You can view videos of any format(almost) with third party apps like avplayer, oplayer. Have used both and both do justice to almost all the formats. have personally tested flv,avi and a few common ones.

IMO, Avplayer is better though.
Click to expand...

Both avplayer and oplayer are not free. What free FLV player do you recommend me?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom