Playing video with alpha channel in AS3 (VP6 On2)

Question

I want to display a video with alpha channel. I've found an old article that describes exactly what I want to do, and says that it is possible with VP6 On2 codec, which tends to be correct according to adobe site:

The On2 VP6 codec provides:

• Higher quality video when compared to the Sorenson Spark codec encoded at the same data rate

• Support for the use of an 8-bit alpha channel to composite video

The designer I am working with was able to create such a video in AfterEffects, but when I play it flash player does nothing: no errors, no log entries - it just silently works without drawing a thing. However when I asked the designer to encode the video without alpha channel flash played it perfectly.

The code I am using is pretty straightforward:

var flvPlayback:FLVPlayback = new FLVPlayback();
flvPlayback.addEventListener(MetadataEvent.METADATA_RECEIVED, onMetadataReceived);
flvPlayback.width = 300;
flvPlayback.height = 300;
flvPlayback.play("http://192.168.0.102:9998/assets/video/test.flv");

I am developing in IntelliJ IDEA, using Flex SDK 4.6 and FLVPlaybackAS3 component from Flash Professional 2015.

Do I understand correctly that Flash dropped support for FLV videos with alpha channel? If yes, then is there any other alternative that is production-ready?

P.S. I am aware of producing such an effect by combining two videos' output to bitmap (where one video contains RGB data and other contains mask as RGB), but it doesn't produce steady FPS on an average hardware.

Answer 1

Try this code:

flvPlayback.alpha = 0.2;

I have checked this with FLVPlayback 2.5 in Flash Player app