JW Player for Flash - supported file formats

Mediafile formats

The following mediafile formats are supported:

Though SWF files also load in the player, it is discouraged to use them. The player cannot read the duration and dimensions of SWF files and cannot control its volume or playback.

The FLV and MP3 formats can also be played through RTMP, both on-demand and live. Testing has been done with the Wowza server, but flash Media Server and Red5 should work fine too.

HTTP streaming for FLV is supported as well (through the streamscript variable). An example script is xmoov-php. For the Lighttpd webserver, both FLV and H264 are supported.

More technical info on the file formats supported by Flash can be found in this blogpost from Tinic Uro, one of the developers of the Flash plugin.

Playlist formats

The following playlist formats are supported:

Here is an overview of all the tags of each format the player processes, and the flashvars they correspond to:

Flashvars XSPF iRSS mRSS SMIL ASX ATOM
author creator itunes:author media:credit #.author author media:credit
description annotation description description #.alt abstract summary
duration duration itunes:duration media:content #.dur duration media:content
file location enclosure media:content #.src ref media:content
link info link link anchor moreinfo link rel='alternate'
image image - media:thumbnail img param name=’image’ media:thumbnail
start meta rel=’start’ - media:content #.begin starttime media:content
title title title title #.title title title
type meta rel=’type’ enclosure media:content #.type param name=’type’ media:content

All media: tags can be embedded in a media:group element. Itunes and mrss tags can be mixed in one RSS feed: the player will pick the first matching element for each property.

Note that the media:content start usage here do not comply to the MRSS specifications. It is included to support RSS and ATOM start positions.

By inserting the same file in a playlist multiple times with a different start position, the playlist will function as a chapter-index (example).

Captioning formats

the following captioning formats are supported:

Note that both Captionate and 3GPP captions are embedded in the videostream. Captionate can be used for FLV streams, 3GPP for MP4 streams.