Flash glossary: F4V
The FLV and F4V formats are container formats, each of which is associated with a set of video and audio formats. The FLV and F4V formats provide technological and creative benefits that allow you to fuse video with data, graphics, sound, and interactive control. You can publish SWFs with digital video that are cross-platform and cross-browser compatible.
F4V is the newer type of video file. It uses the H.264 codec for video compression and supports AAC for audio compression. Support for the H.264 video codec was incorporated into Adobe Flash Player beginning with Flash Player 9 Update 3 (9,0,115,0). The F4V video format, which uses this codec, provides a significantly better quality-to-bitrate ratio than previous web video codecs. It is more computationally demanding than the Sorenson Spark and On2 VP6 video codecs released with Flash Player 7 and 8.
Note: F4V does not support alpha video channels. Cue points can be embedded in the XMP metadata of an F4V file, but parsing that data requires custom ActionScript code.
After creating an F4V movie file (using Adobe Media Encoder or other software), you can use the Video Import wizard to import the digital video file.
For more information and links to tutorials, see Add video to Flash and the section titled Video formats and Flash in the Flash documentation.
To learn more about working with F4V video, read the article titled H.264 for the rest of us. The F4V format is based on the format specified by ISO/IEC 14496-12:2008 (ISO base media file format).
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