UPDATE: This comment is not true, as I just corrected here.
Original text:
In the middle of the flood of informations regarding the upcoming release of Snow Leopard from Apple, I didn't find any reference to this fact. And given it might be of interest to some of you, there you have it:
QuickTime Player X, the version which will be included in Snow Leopard, does play .flv videos on the fly*, and furthermore: it can save those videos to m4v. This means that the video format more widely utilized in the video sites such as youtube etc will be natively supported by QuickTime Player. But there is more: when this version of QuickTime is included in the version of OS X included in iPhone/iPod Touch, it will allow you to watch those videos, without prior conversion, on your iPhone or iPod Touch. I think this fact deserves being noticed, as it will save quite some time to many people interested in .flv videos.
But even if you don't use Apple's portable devices, it is really convenient to play .flv videos straight on QuickTime, and besides you can convert them to m4v for playback with iTunes. Interestingly, you can also export in HD format (H.264 video at 5 Mbps max). Yet I found bizarre that you can not directly add flv video files to your iTunes library, although they appear active in the "Add to library" window.
* Well, maybe "on the fly" is too much saying; in fact, QuickTime Player X takes some time to load the flv file first, before allowing its playback. This is very fast in short files, but noticeably longer when long files are played.
Adding Perian to an 10.5/10.4 installation results in exactly this behavior; perhaps Apple has licensed or included Perian?
ReplyDeleteUm, Perian on MacOS X 10.5 plays flv vids quite nicely...
ReplyDeleteFarewell, TubeSock. I enjoyed you, lo these many years.
ReplyDeletePerian has supported FLV playback in QuickTime for a while now - nice to know that Apple is considering building FLV support in directly.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't Flash support H.264? That's probably what's being played here; an H.264 video wrapped in .flv file.
ReplyDeleteWOw! Amazing!
ReplyDeleteLet's just hope that it can also play WMV files (through a plugin) without having to preload them all to memory!
You have Perian installed.
ReplyDeleteYou probably have Perian installed.
ReplyDeleteThis is amazingly slick, and I hope that they do bring this feature to the iphone. Perhaps it will be more likely wit the faster hardware in the 3GS.
ReplyDeleteIf it takes a while to open, it's likely using the QuickTime 7 path, not QuickTime X. Do you have a QuickTime component like Perian installed by any chance?
ReplyDeleteCan you confirm that you don't have Perian installed? (It adds FLV support to QuickTime.)
ReplyDeleteWhich is great if the flv files are in HTML5 video tags, and pretty useless if they're embedded in flash movies.
ReplyDeleteOne day, maybe.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteUseful info. Quick question: Does it do DivX as well?
Yeah... So in short, it's exactly like using Perian ?
ReplyDeleteare you sure you don't have perian installed? use command i to get into while playing and see what decoder it's using. i can't get it to play .flv h263 files without perian in the wwdc build (i also wouldn't be surprised if it was for h264 only, but that would seem a bit lame, i also can't find a h264 .flv file anywhere)
ReplyDeleteAre you use this isn't Perian kicking in? Check in the Movie Inspector window of QuickTime.
ReplyDeleteNice. Seems basically that QuickTime Player X is incorporating many of the codecs and abilities that installing Perian with Leopard/QuickTime now will get you.
ReplyDeleteNice to have it built in though – as you mention, this will really be useful when this new QuickTime version is included in iPhone/iPod Touch.
You have Perian installed don't you?
ReplyDeleteI can say for certain that QuickTime X is UNABLE to play .flvs natively at least in the current seed. Perian is allowing you to play .flvs
ReplyDelete"Yet I found bizarre that you can not directly add flv video files to your iTunes library"
ReplyDeleteiTunes is iTunes, nothing what it does should strike you as bizarre :)
I would guess iTunes still uses some old APIs for video that do not understand flv, also it may do some own processing trying to find out if the file suits it or not, and that just is not updated to the post-Bush era.
In any case, nice find, and as Gruber said this is good stuff for iPhone owners (some time in the future).
I also can't play any of my .flv files with a clean install of the WWDC preview. I'm guessing you did an upgrade install over an existing 10.5 system with the Perian codecs installed...
ReplyDeleteIt's entirely possible that file is simply a misnamed MP4 video. Sometimes lazy Internet People do that to shoehorn MP4 video in an existing FLV workflow.
ReplyDeleteSnow Leopard will play back H.264 MP4 material no matter what its file extension claims to be.
iMobileCinema on jailbroken iphones can play a lot of FLV streams if they are called in the embed tag (as most video sharing sites do) and not embedded in the .swf.
ReplyDeletejust to clarify, .flv != .swf. so this doesn't really say much about the possibility of the iphone ever supporting flash as a whole. there's not really much point to the iphone supporting .flv without also supporting .swf, since it's trivial to convert .flv to h.264.
ReplyDelete---- He has Perian installed. ----
ReplyDeletehttp://www.perian.org/
Quick time is great piece of software but just last week i discovered this amazing software from Moovida. It is so beautiful to use. It plays 99% of file types including .mkv an ogg.
ReplyDeleteI arranges through all the media files on your computer automatically an then adds additional information to them.
for instance if the file is a movie it will add the films art work an a synopsis on the movie.
Any how please download an enjoy for free
WWW.MOOVIDA.COM
forinstance if the file is a movie it will add the films art work an a synopsis on the movie.
Any how please download an enjoy for free
WWW.MOOVIDA.COM
Hey, there, Jose... Just stumbled across your blog while looking for some info. Glad to know you're still around on the interwebs!
ReplyDelete:)
Jazzmaster
Hi Jazzmaster, nice to see you around.
ReplyDeleteYes, I keep on posting at this blog from time to time. What about you, do you keep your interest on purple stuff?
Cheers! :D
I'm going to bookmark this so I can keep up with you! I love how the net makes this such a small world.
ReplyDeleteSo, do you think Madrid is going to get the Olympics?
Haven't really kept up with the little purple guy. I feel kinda' shafted w/ HQ gone.
Perian has supported FLV playback in QuickTime for a while now - nice to know that Apple is considering building FLV support in directly. how to convert flv to wmv mac
ReplyDeleteThat is a nice video but not very clear, and i still prefer to convert AVI to DVD with a software.
ReplyDelete