Josh Buhler alerted us out in “Flash Community of twitterland” of a hackaday posting about Flash Video playing on the iPhone via a 3rd party Safari Plug-in called iMobileCinema.

iMobileCinema plays back youtube, google, and other videos inside what is reported as Flash Video (.FLV) (using their own Flash Player Plug-in technology)

“iMobileCinema is a powerful Safari plugin for playing internet videos on your iPhone or iPod touch. You can watch millions of videos on any podcast site or blogs with it. Install it and visit Google Video, Youtube, or any other sites via Safari. Bunches of videos are waiting for you.”

Here is a video of iMobileCinema playing a youtube video:

iMobileCinema Plug-in for Safari on the iPhone playing Flash Video

Not sure, if this is the 1st instance of a company leveraging Flash as a Safari-plugin under iPhone for video use cases, but it’s the first one that actually came to my attention.

Well, I just tried it to play some youtube videos and the plug-in is not too shabby for video playback (you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone) …

Testing iMobileCinema on my jailbroken iPhone

This is the first instance of any Flash video playback I’ve actually seen running on an iPhone (although Adobe has stated numerous times over the past year that they have “a” Flash Player for iPhone, but require Apple‘s blessing to get it on the iPhone).

I headed over to Aral’s www.playerversion.com and Player 9,0,124,0 was being reported (but, not sure how much the player is implemented!? Maybe only Flash Video support is implemented for .FLV playback).

Playerversion.com reporting back on its findings

I had no luck with other Flash websites I tried … perhaps, because a.) it is a partial implementation only allowing .FLV playback, b.) buggy, or c). the player detection code running on those sites is not playing nice. I think it a permutation of the three, actually.

Some Flash Content (I believe only published v7 or v8 SWF’s) on my site, did not render properly in the iMobileCinema plug-in. Could be be FLV playback support only.

Flash Video leverage on other Mobile Internet Devices!
There may also be other companies creating video applications for iPhone which playback .FLV … this trend is not only here on iPhone, but also big on Nokia for companies to support .FLV!

For instance, here is Mobiatubia for Nokia S60 devices, it’s an awesome little native .FLV player:

Mobiatubia is one of several Nokia S60 Flash Video (.FLV) players out there for millions of devices, worldwide (this one appears to be a Symbian device in Japan!)

Yep, Flash Video is probably one the best features with Flash Mobile, and people don’t really realize it (or should they have too! Probably not, that’s the whole point! Transparency of technology used. End user doesn’t care of it’s Flash or not, they just want it to work, and work well!).

Anyways, yes, Flash Lite 3.1 supports .FLV and even H.264 on supported devices … and we’ll probably see Flash 10 on a few devices late next year … what % of market those will be is still an unknown, so don’t be thinking Flash Lite has gone away just quite yet! Numbers count, big time in mobile.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 12:13 am and is filed under Apple, Flash, Flash Lite, Flash Lite 3.1, Flash Mobile, Flash Mobile Developer, Flash Video, Mobile, Mobile Application, Mobile Developer, Mobile Internet Device, Mobile OEM, Mobile Platform, Mobile Video, Mobitubia, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.