We have just pushed live a new version of the FLVio video web service that gives clients the option to encode (Flash-compatible) H.264 video.

Many people probably already know that Adobe added support for H.264 video (in an mp4 container) to Flash Player late last year. This was welcome news to many people as H.264 is an open standard and provides much higher quality video (at lower bandwidths) than standard "FLV" video.

The only gotcha is that end users need to have a recent version of Flash Player installed (Flash Player 9 Update 3 aka version 9.0.115.0 or newer) to playback H.264 video.

However, many popular Flash media players can be configured to attempt to playback H.264 video within the browser and automatically fallback to the FLV alternative if the version of Flash Player is too old. FLVio has been designed to support this by providing the option to encode both FLV and H.264 videos automatically for the client, providing easy access to the best of both worlds: high quality video playback and backwards compatibility.

I have spent most of this year, so far, designing and building a video web service, which has been branded as FLVio. We have just announced the launch of FLVio with our first live customer, one of a few who helped us with beta testing.

The idea behind FLVio is to solve all the problems behind adding video content (especially UGC) to a web site. Every second web site that launches nowadays seems to be some kind of social network, and many of them want all the bells & whistles that the big guys have, including user-generated video content. FLVio helps small (and large) businesses integrate video content without the pain and upfront expense, by solving these key problems:

• storage


• encoding


• delivery

Videos are relatively large, so you need reliable storage, and plenty of it. Simple as that.

Videos (especially UGC) can be uploaded in any of a huge variety of video formats and codecs, all of which need to be re-encoded into a format that is playable within the browser and optimised for efficient web delivery. FLVio encodes almost all non-proprietary formats into Flash-compatible video (FLV and H.264), solving the other problem with re-encoding and that is CPU resources. The last thing you want to do is to have your web application server grinding away to re-encode user uploaded videos into FLV. Offloading that workload to FLVio leaves your server resources available for rendering web applications as they should be.

FLVio delivers video via progressive HTTP download, the favoured method these days for serving Flash-based video. Videos are served directly from the FLVio web servers to the web browser, avoiding the need to scale up your own web farm to handle the multitude of long-lived requests that media delivery typically requires, not to mention the unknown bandwidth costs that media delivery can add. FLVio has partnered with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider so that we can also accelerate media delivery for the best possible user experience.

FLVio integrates with a web application by means of a RESTful API. All interaction with FLVio is behind the scenes, at the API level, so web applications keep full control over the user experience, including upload forms and video playback. The fact that video management and delivery has been "outsourced" is transparent to users of the web application. I won't go into detail about the API here, for more details you can read a brief technical overview here. For the curious, the whole service was built with Python and is running on a farm of Solaris servers.

We've got a simple demonstration of a FLVio-based application where you can upload a video and see the results of the re-encoding process.

Any questions or comments, feel free to contact FLVio or myself directly.