For many years, WSN has been using an open source flash script called OSFLV for embedding uploaded videos. This required activating the "convert videos to flv" switch and ensuring that ffmpeg was installed on your web server, which wasn't always possible in shared hosting environments and could be a pain on unmanaged dedicated servers. Also, more importantly, it meant your mobile users couldn't watch the videos because mobile devices don't usually support Flash.

Recently I found that OSFLV was no longer working correctly -- the osplayer.swf player wasn't showing up. I looked for documentation and discovered that the OSFLV script is no longer developed and the online materials for it have been taken down. Since it's dangerous to continue relying on a component that's abandoned (it could develop security holes), I set out to find a replacement video player component.

In the end, I settled on Flow Player. It has good documentation, is easy to integrate, and has the popularity and longevity to indicate that it'll stick around for years to come. It's integrated now in WSN 9.2.27.

A bonus from this change is that Flow Player isn't limited to flv videos -- any type of video can now be played. Under the hood, this uses the HTML 5 <video> tag. The upshot is that you no longer need ffmpeg (or youtube) in order to show uploaded videos with a listing. You also no longer need flash, which means if you upload a .mov, .mp4, .m4v or .avi file it can play on an ipad, iphone or other mobile devices that don't have Flash.

FFmpeg is still useful for autogenerating thumbnail images from videos, so the autoconversion switch will remain.