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H.264 Flash Lite 3.1 on Nintendo Wii

Posted: 04/05/10

An image of H.264 Flash Lite 3.1 on Nintendo Wii

I was recently asked to look into the capabilities of video playback in Flash Lite 3.1 on the Wii Internet Channel. I decided it might be useful for other developers (and me in future) to document what I've found, as there is plenty of conflicting information on the Internet about the capabilities of Flash Lite 3.1 on the Wii. After plenty of trial-and-error and digging around, I've arrived at the following conclusions.

The Flash Player version on the Wii reports itself as 9.1.122.0 - which is the version number corresponding to Flash Lite 3.1. This version of the Flash Player does not support ActionScript 3.0. It is able to run AS2 code targeting the Flash Player 8 API, together with a few extra media API features that are available in Flash Player 9. This includes, but is not limited to: RTMPE, LocalConnection, HTML Text, and Video Smoothing.

To check the version on your Wii point your browser to http://flashbuilder.eu/flash-player-version.html

The Wii does not have OEM porting of H.264 to the chipset, which prevents playback of H.264 content in the Flash Player running in the Opera browser on the Internet Channel. The Wii cannot play H.264 in the Flash Player running in the browser. For the Wii to be able to do this, it would either need FlashLite 3.1 + StageCraft 1.2, or Flash Player 9.0.115.0 (better).

The Wii is able to play H.264 video in a native application or channel, written against the Wii Development Kit.

It is possible to play FLV content (both Sorenson Spark and On2 VP6) directly in the Flash Player over RTMP, RTMPE and HTTP. This is how YouTube and other video sites supporting the Wii are delivering their video content.

Keywords for this post: flash, actionscript, wii, nintendo, video, h.264, flash lite