Does 3Essentials support Flash video on my hosting plan? |
Article ID: 40 |
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According to Macromedia's online tutorials, you basically have 3 options to deliver Flash Video to website visitors using Flash Player:
- Embedded video (an SWF file with video embedded)
- Progressive Download (an SWF file and a FLV file)
- Streaming Video (an SWF file, an FLV file, and a server side component for streaming
3Essentials hosting supports the first two: Embedded Video and Progressive Download. To IIS (the web server) there really is no difference between SWF, FLA, FLV files and a plain old HTML file... because to the web server, they are just simply files. The webserver downloads the file to the browser, and the browser's Flash Video plug-in is what makes the video play. The only support required on the server (on our hosting) to support these two video modes are the addition of FLV, FLA, and SWF file types as MIME types (basically tells the webserver what types of files they, so it will go ahead and download them to the browser. 3Essentials has these MIME types in place on all shared hosting servers.
The third type, Streaming Video, requires Flash Communication Server MX installed on the server. 3Essentials hosting does not support this. If you're site requires video streaming or a large volume of video, then we would refer you to a hosting provider specializing in those services.
The Progressive Download model does work similar to the streaming model, and starts playback in the visitor's browser before the entire video file has downloaded. Macromedia's website provides tutorials and discussions on the pros/cons of each model and when to use each - the following article is a good one to review: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flv_download.html?pss=rss_flash_dc_flv_download .
If you're having problems with FLASH running on your site, the following download includes a functional example... you can download the zip file, extract it on your system, and then publish it to your site in any directory. If you publish it to www.yourdomain.com/flashtest, then you can test it by going to www.yourdomain.com/flashtest/index.html. On that page, you should see a video, provided through Progressive Download and a link to a second page with a vide using Embedded Video type. |
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