FLVPlayback component in Flash 8 (AS2) and support for HD H.264 video

Question

I have developed a video player using Flash 8 Professional and the FLVPlayback component. Recently I have been testing a few 720p .mov files converted to FLV by FFMPEG running on an encoding server. I am noticing that these files do not play back in my video player. It appears that they do not have any audio attached to them but when I play them in Adobe Media Player the audio is there. Is this due to the FLVPlayback component in Flash 8 not supporting HD videos? When I test locally the video picture plays with no sound but when I run in a browser the video freezes and does not play. The progress bar appears to move as if the video is playing however.

So I want to try and recreate my work as a Flash CS4 project, still publish as AS2 but hopefully be able to use the updated FLVPlayback component in CS4 that can support h264 video.

Will this work?

------------------------------------ UPDATE ---------------------------------------------

I noticed that the video would not play until it had completely loaded, this was true in Adobe Media Player and Flash Player. It seems that progressive downloading is not working for my video, Flash Player requires that the whole video loads before it will begin playing. I found the following information on this -

Another SO question on this topic
Scott Morgan post about Progressive H264 video

Here is the metadata attached to my FLV video -

Your Flash Version = WIN 10,0,45,2
filesize = 1936004
audiocodecid = 10
stereo = false
audiosamplesize = 16
audiosamplerate = 44100
audiodatarate = 93.75
videocodecid = 2 (This is Sorenson h263)
framerate = 24
videodatarate = 683.59375
height = 240
width = 320

Answer 1

Yes, you can use Flash CS4 to make a ActionScript 2 project and use the latest FLVPlayback component. Flash CS4 supports versions 1, 2, and 3 of ActionScript.

Yet, I don't think that is the problem with this project. Your existing project should use the video playback code in whatever version of the Flash Player software installed on your system. Maybe just updating the Flash Player will get you working video. If you're publishing this FLV or use with these videos on the Web, you may want to check for a newer version of Flash on the browser.

I don't have any additions to the other SO question you mention on fixing progressive playback while downloading.

Answer 2

There's this thing called a moov atom (yes, with two "o"s) which is part of the H.264 codec—it indexes the file—and if it's not located at the front of the file then the movie won't be able to play until the entire thing is downloaded. The moov atom gets put in when the video is created and certain products like Adobe Premier CS3 & After Effects CS3 will put this at the end of the file. However there's a note that Adobe was working to update that issue with a patch but I don't know if it was ever fixed. If you are streaming from a CDN which uses Flash Media Server then this becomes a non-issue because the video is then streamed and (according to the docs) indexed by the FMS. Source: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/hd_video_flash_player_02.html

Maybe try this? http://blog.six4rty.ch/2008/05/14/h264-and-the-moov-atom/