[sarosh]

Hi,
I want to know how does xbmc play streams that are using flash player. Does it uses an external player. Can someone please explain this line to me in plain english how it works. My team and I are trying to build a plugin and want to know how to play vidoes, that will be on our server using flash player.

rtmp://176.31.231.124/edge/ playpath=8zqdbyxk0ybf7es swfUrl=http://cdn.static.ilive.to/jwplayer/player.swf live=true pageUrl=http://www.ilive.to/view/30870/"*


thanks

[negge]

The video is available over the RTMP protocol which XBMC plays using its internal player with the help of librtmp.

[sarosh]

so why http://cdn.static.ilive.to/jwplayer/player.swf this player is needed. Still sort of lost

[negge]

From Wikipedia:

This is the URL address of the SWF player used to play the stream, as indicated by the web page from which the stream is derived. For example, path/9player.swf?revision=18269_21576

Doesn't really explain that much though, and I don't know either.

If you're in control of the server I strongly advice you to not use RTMP and Flash. Practically all other streaming protocols work better in XBMC than RTMP.

[spiff]

you need to realize the role of flash, rtmp and the player.

flash is just a virtual machine. on that virtual machine, a horrible horrible horrible, slow, arsef*ck, need to die die die, video player is embedded.
this player plays a stream sent over the rtmp protocol.

there is *NO SUCH THING* as flash video. that's adobe marketing nonsense. there is the flash video container (.flv) typically holding streams in very common formats, typically aac + h264.
then there is the transport protocol, rtmp, which is drm infested piece of crap that luckily has been reversed to bits.

with these two in place (flv demuxer, rtmp transport protocol), you can just play the video as you play any other video stream, using any player of your choice (we use the our standard video player..) we get the demuxer from libavformat, and the rtmp implementation from librtmp.

the fact that you have to give the reference to the swf is caused by the drm obfuscation layers. it's an attempt to tie a video stream to your particular flash based player.

[negge]

Thanks for the explanation spiff!