FLV gone from Media Encoder - which formats work on iOS anymore?

[BorisHansen]

The withdrawal of the FLV format has thoroughly confused me. FLV is the only video format I've ever succesfully worked with in AIR apps on iOS. MP4, MOV etc. - all these formats never played when I tested them on iOS devices. Only FLV. I know that StageVideo gives some more options, but my question is:

With FLV getting phased out, which video format options will work in AIR apps for iOS (without using StageVideo) at this point?

[Colin Holgate]

You could play H.264 with StageWebView, but that has its own issues. Playing H.264 with StageVideo turns out not to be too hard, you just have to do exactly the right things!

Also, StageVideo does not require Direct rendermode, it works fine with GPU mode.

[BorisHansen]

Yeah, but using StageVideo / StageWebView makes it complicated to to have video in an app with all kinds of other functionality. At least for a low-level programmer like me.

So are we really talking about Adobe removing the one video format that just worked flawlessly on iOS devices without jumping through the hoops of StageVideo and StageWebView? That makes no sense to me.

[Colin Holgate]

For what it's worth, the frame rate of large FLV in iOS, on average devices, is not very good. You need iPhone 5 or iPad Air to get good frame rates. StageVideo gives perfect frame rates on an iPhone 3gs.

You don't get transparency, but what other features of FLV will you miss?

[kaveri2]

Are they really removing FLV playback support?! I may understand removing it from Media Encoder, but there are plenty of other (better) ways to encode FLV.

And you are right, FLV is the only format that works. If I remember correctly, StageVideo requires direct renderMode and you can't add that on top of other graphic elements. We're using a few second video clips like graphics, so that they are heavily moved around the stage along with other elements.

[BorisHansen]

I don't think they're removing FLV playback from Flash anytime soon, they're just phasing out the format as officially supported.

[Guest]

I run CS6 at home, but I talked with one of the IT guys at work and he told me that if you have a CC account, you should still be able to download CS6 versions of Adobe applications. If that is true (and not just a corporate account thing), you could download the CS6 version of Media Encoder and use that if you needed to still be able to create FLV files. But if you wanted to give H.264 another try, there numerous preset encoding options under the H.264 encoding type for Apple devices that you could try as an alternative to FLV. In my experience with videos, you're going to get a better quality video anyway at a smaller file size using H.264.