flowplayer 202 The provider specified in this clip is not loaded, Provider audio.clip: [clip]

This sounds like FlowPlayer can't find the audio plugin (you need both the FlowPlayer AND the audio plugin)

From the SWF Tools project page...

FlowPlayer is a little more tricky to set up - you will need to download the player (the zip includes the player and the control bar plugin). Then for audio playback you need the audio plugin, and for rtmp you need the streaming plugin. All plugins are also installed in swftools/shared/flowplayer3. Note that the name of the player and the streaming plugin varies with each FlowPlayer release, so remember to visit the site configuration page and make sure the names match the ones you have!

Verify that you have the correct plugin, and that your configuration page also has the right filename (FlowPlayer3 filenames change between versions). The latest player is flowplayer-3.0.7.swf and the latest audio plug in is flowplayer.audio-3.0.4.swf

I'm not sure about mpg video playback - I've never tried that through FlowPlayer!

But everything is working ok for me here, and if you can play the audio through FlowPlayer 2 then it says SWF Tools is working correctly, so the missing plugin is the most likely problem.

THat's right - the audio and controls plugins are detected automatically by FlowPlayer so they don't appear on the config page.

So you are saying FlowPlayer3 isn't working, even with all the plugins in apparently in place??

I seem to remember having an issue with the cache - try emptying your browser cache and reloading the page to see if that kicks it in to life!

Can you confirm the version of SWF Tools, the embedding method that you are using (direct, SWF Object2 etc) and the code that you are using to generate the content (e.g. swf tools input filter, PHP call). Please post an example of the code.

The problem is that SWF Tools has so many variables, that it gets tricky to diagnose problems now!

(note to self - could a "diagnostic" mode be created that helps people get the data needed to help fault find?)

@neorg - you need to download and add the JavaScript to the shared directory (the documentation page describes this, and has links to the files you need).

But, davebv has tried both direct embedding, and SWF Object 2, and neither worked for him (and actually, when you view the source of what SWF Object actually produces it is pretty much the same as what direct embedding does!)

Do either of you have a public facing page with the non-functional player on it? All I can think of to do is view the source code for your pages that don't work, and compare to my pages that do. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but we can at least compare paths, see if there's some funny JavaScript going on. A long shot but I'm not sure where else to go.

I'm really puzzled as I do my development here on a laptop, I have a desktop that I occassionally use, and I recently did some dev work on my work laptop, and they all worked fine with FlowPlayer3. All I can think of is that for some reason the way that FlowPlayer is supposed to grab the audio plug in is failing on your installations. Where are your files hosted? Do you know what they're hosted on?

Out of interest, if you try to play an flv (that doesn't need the audio plugin), does that work ok?

NB - reverting title to original in case anyway else is experiencing this issue and so that they know where to post. Raising status to critical.

Last thought - try downloading the audio plug in again, but use the zip file. I vaguely recall having an issue early on with flowplayer audio not working, and the direct download file was half the size to the one in the zip. When I used the one out the zip it worked (sorry, feel like I'm clutching at straws now but I'd really like to get this working for you!) Here's the link: http://www.flowplayer.org/plugins/streaming/audio.html

--edit
DON'T MAKE THE CODE CHANGE DESCRIBED HERE! Rename your audio plugin as described here instead!
--/edit

This is bizarre - I just made a brand new Drupal install, and now I get the same error!

So there is something weird going on with FlowPlayer3's auto detection process.

Try adding the following at line 177 of flowplayer3.module

  // Manually add the flowplayer audio plugin
  $plugin_path = $GLOBALS['base_url'] .'/'. swftools_get_player_path() . '/flowplayer3/';
  $flowplayer['plugins']['audio']['url'] = $plugin_path . 'flowplayer.audio-3.0.4.swf';

It goes just before

  // Convert flowplayer array to JSON, and assign to a flashvar called config
  $flashvars['config'] = drupal_to_js($flowplayer);

This will force the plug in to load from the specific directory, and a specific file (the 3.0.4 version of the plug in), rather than relying on FlowPlayer3 to "automatically" detect it.

That fixed it for me. Given that this issue seems to be unpredictable as to whether it will impact a site or not then if this works for you I think I will put this in the module as a "guarantee" that the plugin will load.

Note to self - I am guessing that this issue will break the streaming plugin, which is working fine on the system where the audio is currently working!

OK - I've done some experiments between my two systems, and it looks like the issue is the flowplayer.audio-3.0.4.swf. With version 3.0.3 it works without having to set an explicit path to the plugin. Just drop the plugin in to the shared folder and off it goes. But try that with 3.0.4 you have to be explicit, which the FlowPlayer3 module doesn't do!

On my (working) installation I had both the 3.0.3 and 3.0.4 plugins in my shared folder. I tested, and if you have both plugins available then again it works without being explicit (no idea which one it actually loads!)

Unfortunately, because I did all my development on a machine with both plugins available it all looked ok!

I tried looking on the FlowPlayer website, but I can't see the 3.0.3 file for download anywhere.

In the meantime, the suggested code above will fix the issue for the flowplayer module.

Also, as the issue seems to be the audio plug in I'm hoping the streaming plug in will work "out of the box".

Glad we got it fixed. Developing SWF Tools can be very frustrating because it is now such a complex module, people try to do all sorts with it, and the players themselves keep getting updated.

I posted a reply to neorg's over at the flowplayer forum (http://www.flowplayer.org/forum/1/16002#post-16712)

Hopefully the developers will be able to fix the plugin so we can go back to the (much more elegant) way of doing things where you can just drop the plugin in the right place.

Anyhow, glad we got it sorted!

@neorg - the fix will hopefully work for you too!

Aha! I don't know why this didn't occur to me before. I suspect that if you look in your Drupal site event log you will see lots of instances of

• Type: page not found
• Location: {module path}/shared/flowplayer3/flowplayer.audio-3.0.3.swf
• Referrer: {module path}/shared/flowplayer3/flowplayer-3.0.7.swf

IE - the player is trying to call version 3.0.3 of the audio plugin. My log is full of these. So we can see for sure that the player is trying to load the 3.0.3 plugin. But rather than having to fix the Drupal flowplayer module, which is ugly, you can just rename flowplayer.audio-3.0.4.swf to flowplayer.audio-3.0.3.swf. As far as I can tell from a very quick look in the source code the player only builds a filename, and there doesn't appear to be any "version string" inside the plugin.

Do that and you can have the latest audio plug in (3.0.3 had some bugs in it), and you don't have to change the code as described in #9.

Probably have to clear your browser cache to pick up the new plugin! That's good discipline anyway when trying fault find flash!!!!

@davebv - is your issue maybe related to http://drupal.org/node/395502#comment-1337240? If the flv file is missing metadata then it seems to result in various outcomes, including flv not playing, or playing the audio but no video.

There are instructions at that link of how to check your flv.

I tested a known good flv locally and it's working ok for me.

Given the player is working on a remote site it sounds like it must be a config issue, but that's something I really don't know much about I'm afraid!

I don't know how flowplayer works out whether the file is audio or video, so don't know whether it looks at the file extension or the file header.

Thinking out loud - is the local server serving the file as the right type? Is it possible that although it has the extension flv it is being served as an audio type, and it's confusing the player??!!

I think we need someone with some more experience on server configuration at this point! Sorry!!

I've been having a look around inside the source code of FlowPlayer3, and it looks like it just uses the file extension (at least, I think it does), so that kind of kills the idea of it being a server config!

Does the flv play in, say, Wijering, or FlowPlayer 2?

I'm still stumped, so not sure what else to suggest!

I've tried with 3 different flv files and all of them play with the default player and JW4 correctly.

That makes it sound like the actual FlowPlayer3 is unhappy about something. It's working for me here so I'm fairly confident the Drupal module is ok. I've been having a few odd glitches with FlowPlayer3 - sometimes it refuses to play streamed media for no obvious reason, and then it works again. It's a great looking player, but I wonder if it still has a few wrinkles in it underneath :-)

Glad you got it working, even if we're not sure what was wrong!

Setting this thread as fixed now since all issues in here are resolved, at least with respect to SWF Tools!