Consider this a good excuse to move to a new player. If you’ve built a custom Flash Player, this can be a bit tricky. Integrate a library like hls.js or video.js into your player. Playing HLS with MSE sounds promising (and it is awesome), but it’s not completely straightforward. Now your viewers can play your HLS streams anywhere, without that annoying Flash Player plugin.
#JAVASCRIPT FLASH PLAYER ERROR MP4#
This Fragmented MP4 is then playable in-browser thanks to the Media Source Extensions API (MSE). Two open-source libraries, hls.js and video.js, will effectively transmux your HLS streams into a byte stream, called Fragmented MP4, seamlessly, on-the-fly. Once upon a time, this may have been a problem, but today this issue can be circumvented easily. Unfortunately, all desktop browsers don’t have native support. Though many viewers use a Flash plugin to stream HLS in their browser, they don’t need to! In fact, we wrote a post last year to show that you can deliver HLS streams better without Flash!Īll major mobile browsers natively support the HLS protocol. So what does the death of Flash Player mean for your video streams?įirst of all, don’t worry. While some platforms, including Chrome, already default to HTML5 Players, until now these browsers have still been able to load Flash and fallback to Flash Player. Though many users have abandoned Flash Player over the past few years, it is still pretty widely used. Chrome’s decision will likely be great for the web as a whole, but in the video streaming world, it was a cause for some concern. Chrome promises that these changes will lead to lighter websites that load faster and consume less battery life. Last week the Chrome team announced that it would block Flash applications, including the Flash Player, from loading in its browser. Google’s newest Flash related announcement might be the death knell. By 2011, Adobe announced the end of Flash Player for mobile devices. Earlier this summer, Flash Player was forced to release updates with 36 security patches in one week! Steve Jobs, who was famously anti-Flash, released this scathing statement in 2010 and refused to make the iPhone Flash compatible. Flash Player, whose security has had more holes than Swiss cheese, has long been a burden. Flash Player has been a huge problem for years, and its ultimate demise will be celebrated by most in the tech world. TL DR: if you play HLS, it’s time to add MSE playbackĪdobe’s Flash Player is going the way of the Dodo, but its extinction is not cause for concern.