Supported Video Formats
When creating a Video page or pagelet, Sandvox can handle a wide range of formats. All Quicktime compatible formats are supported, as well as Adobe Flash files.
Supporting Additional Formats
You can extend the formats that Quicktime supports by installing a Quicktime component. With such a component installed, this support extends to Sandvox. Some free examples are:
- Flip4Mac - adds support for WMV (Windows Media Video).
- DivX - adds support for DivX movies.
- Perian - adds support for FLV, 3ivX, DivX, and more
Viewer Restrictions when using Plugins
When you embed a QuickTime-specific or cross-platform file (MP4, MP3, etc.), the media is "wrapped" in some QuickTime information, meaning that QuickTime will be required to view that page. This is generally not a problem since QuickTime is pre-installed on all Macs and very common on Windows machines.
If you embed a movie in a special format or encoding such as those listed above, your site visitors may have to install the appropriate component on their computer to view the page. If you use formats that require a specific QuickTime plugin, you may wish to mention that a special plugin is required to view your site.
If you embed a windows-format file, such as AVI or WMV or WMA, then the page does not use a QuickTime "wrapper" but instead uses the standard Windows Media Player wrapper. This allows Windows users to view the media; Mac users will require Flip4Mac installed to view the content.
iPhone
Note that the iPhone does not support Flash video, so you may wish to avoid using it. For more information, please see "iPhone Compatibility."
Limitations within Sandvox when using Plugins
Some plugins provide only limited support to QuickTime, which means that some functionality associated with standard QuickTime movie files will not extend to Sandvox. For example, Flip4Mac cannot extract the thumbnail out of a WMV file. You will need to manually set a thumbnail for WMV files.
Another limitation with some formats (notably WMV) is that it takes a moment after opening up a page with an embedded WMV file for the correct movie dimensions to be loaded. Once loaded, the dimensions are stored. But if you were to attempt to create a number of pages with WMV files on them and then immediately publish without viewing the pages, the dimensions will not yet have been calculated, and the resulting page may not show the movie at the correct size.
