Kinoma Notes

We’ve had a few cus­tomers ask about Kinoma Player’s Flash Video sup­port. It can be con­fus­ing, so here’s an overview that I hope clears it up for any­body with questions.

Flash Video vs. Flash

It’s impor­tant to dis­tin­guish Flash Video files from generic Flash files.

Generic Flash files can be almost any kind of inter­ac­tive con­tent, from a game to an online word proces­sor. These files use the file exten­sion “swf” and aren’t sup­ported by Kinoma Player. (Gen­er­ally, noth­ing can play these files on mobile devices.)

Kinoma Player sup­ports Flash Video files. These con­tain only video and audio and use the file exten­sion “flv”.

Kinds of FLV files

Kinoma Player sup­ports Flash Video files con­tain­ing Soren­son Spark (a “fla­vor” of H.263, to get tech­ni­cal) and MP3 audio.

This is the “nor­mal” kind of Flash Video file used on YouTube and other video shar­ing sites.

Some Flash Video files use another video for­mat called “VP6”. It offered bet­ter qual­ity but was pro­pri­etary and never got any sig­nif­i­cant trac­tion. Kinoma Player doesn’t sup­port VP6 for those rea­sons, but the good news is that Adobe is now mov­ing away from VP6 in favor of standards-based MPEG-4.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Kinoma Player. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.