We are happy to start the new year with the announcement of a new THEOplayer release with a number of very interesting new features such as support for Chromecast, frame accurate seeking and preview thumbnails. The largest optimisations however are under the hood, with strong reductions in loading times and an extended support matrix. With the addition of support for Firefox for Mac and Opera, THEOplayer now supports on nearly all HTML5 platforms adaptive streaming of HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) without the requirement of external plug-ins such as Flash, Silverlight or QuickTime.
We are excited about these new release and hope you will be too. And a lot more is yet to come - so stay tuned!
Overview of the most important new features:
- Chromecast: THEOplayer offers direct support for playback of HLS on the popular digital media player Chromecast. This cast functionality allows playback of your HLS content directly on Chromecast connected devices from a Chrome browser. Check our Chromecast support by contacting our experts.
- Program-Date-Time: THEOplayer has support for associating media segments with an absolute date and time. This can be useful when you want to synchronise video playback with displaying other relevant information about the video stream.
- Frame Accurate Seeking: THEOplayer allows viewers to frame accurate seek (by frame number) and skip forward or backwards frame-by-frame through an HLS stream on desktop browsers. This is mostly used for video processing applications or for users who require to mark very accurate specific parts of HLS content (e.g. indication for ad insertion, selection of fast-moving actions in sport games, etc.).
- Preview Thumbnails: THEOplayer has support for preview thumbnails, shown when a viewer hovers the seek bar. This allows for quick scanning and navigating of longer-form content.
- Reduction in load times: Internal optimisations in the THEOplayer playback engine now allows for content to start playing instantly once connected to the server. This results in an optimised user experience.
- Extension of the support matrix: The cross-platform support matrix of THEOplayer has been greatly extended, allowing playback on nearly all commonly used HTML5 platforms.
Our new support matrix:
| Platform | Browser |
|---|---|
| Windows | Internet Explorer1 |
| Chrome | |
| Firefox | |
| Opera | |
| OS X | Safari |
| Chrome | |
| Firefox2 | |
| Opera | |
| Linux | Chrome |
| Firefox3 | |
| Opera | |
| Android | Chrome for Android |
| Firefox for Android | |
| Opera | |
| iOS | Safari |
| Chrome for iOS | |
| Opera Mini | |
| Opera Coast | |
| Windows Phone 8.1 | Internet Explorer |
1 Version 10+
2 As of Firefox 35
3 Requires gstreamer H.264 plug-in to be installed
Looking for further information?
