Getting started with Smart TV development
Table of contents
Introduction
The approach to get Flowplayer running on web based Smart TV environments (like Tizen or webOS) is similar across all platforms.
The normal webplayer works similarly as it works on a normal web browser, but there are some gotchas to be aware of.
Common pitfalls
Remote control support
In order to make the player usable with remote control, you need to include a smart tv plugin. Which plugin to choose depends on the underlying platform.
We offer plugins currently for Tizen and webOS.
Media URLs and media types
Most of the Web based Smart TV platforms are running a chromium based browser as the view layer.
The application is served from the filesystem directly with file:/// protocol. This means that you can't use
protocol-relative media urls (//cdn.example.com/myfile.mp4). You need to always include the full absolute media URL with protocol: https://cdn.example.com/myfile.mp4.
The chromium based browser most likely only supports MP4 files out of the box. In order to run HLS or MPEG-DASH content you need to include the playback plugin for flowplayer when you initialise the player. See the respective plugin documentations to see how to include them: HLS, MPEG-DASH.