Mark Anders mentioned a little about the codenamed Philo release due in the second half of the year. Basically he said it was an Apollo app for Video, also mentioned RSS aggregation. I would love to get more information on this project.
March 5th, 2007
This is a very interesting announcement and addition to the Labs site. When Flash 8 came out they introduced a new Flash video codec called VP6 by the company on2. This codec has many benefits compared to the previous Spark codec. But the slight problem with live encoding is that the live encoder for VP6 codec FLV is not part of the Flash Player. Until on2 released their on2 Flix Live product last year there was no product that did “live” VP6 streaming.
With the release of Adobe’s Flash Media Encoder we have an another live encoder, DigitalRapids also has VP6 support through software for their video cards.
The Adobe Flash Media Encoder software it self seems to have promise. I downloaded the software and installed it. At first look it does not look like a typical Windows application but more like a Flash/Flex app wrapped in a exe (I have no real knowledge of what it really is written in).
The Audio options are limited to the NellyMoser codec and up to 32kbps 22Hz Mono. The options for video settings out does on2’s Flix Live software. Also noteworthy is that the FME can save live recordings to file as well as provide a nice log and real time stats of the stream’s bitrate and time.
I couldn’t get it to connect to a FMS but did not have time to test throughly, I was getting some errors on the FMS side that I am not sure if its the FME or the FMS application instance. I’ll try and post more when I have time to play with the application more.
Get FME and the FMS Authentication Plugin-In off the labs now - http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/fme.html
Add comment January 19th, 2007
The FMS team just released an updater to the 2.x server. The update fixes a few bugs, many relating to on2 streams.
You can get the update here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/flashmediaserver/downloads_updaters.html
Here are the release notes:
http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashmediaserver/204/releasenotes.html
A big thanks for the FMS developers and their hard work.
Add comment January 18th, 2007
There was a question on the FlashMedia mailing list about how to get id3 info from a NetStream with AS3 code. It is actually just like AS2 with some quirks to watch out for. The first is the supported ID3 tags:
About supported versions of ID3 tags
Flash Media Server supports playback of ID3 text tags in UTF-8, UTF-16, and ISO-8859-1 formats and supports ID3 versions 1.0, 2.3, and 2.4. Only tags that contain text data are supported, such as song title, artist name, comments, and year recorded.
I had a mp3 with ID3 v2.2 tags that did not work until I put in a v1.0 ID3 tag.
The next is the NetStream is not dynamic in AS3 and you use the client property to handle method calls from the server. There will be a onPlayerStatus and onId3 method call the server makes on the NetStream object.
Here is the running example and source code is available through the right click.
2 comments December 1st, 2006
This news announcement sparks a lot of questions in my mind.
YouTube moves to the small screen
First off its a little confusing because it says,
Users who subscribe to Verizon’s Vcast service will be able to view content on the YouTube website via their mobiles.
and then states this,
The new deal will mean that VCast users, who pay $15 a month to watch and download video to their mobile, will have access to a limited number of approved videos from YouTube.
How do you go from saying that the Vcast service will be able to view content on the YouTube website and then say they will have access to a limited number of approved videos? First off, the YouTube.com website is a Flash/FLV based media player and Vcast is a Mpeg4 based service, would be interesting to know how they implemented that one. I assume this might be some of the reason for limited number of approved videos? because converting FLV to other formats right now is not something of a smooth process. But we are talking about going from a larger resolution to a smaller one so even if you are going from a compressed format to another you will be alright. Most YouTube.com movies are compressed alot though so I wonder if they are limiting it to videos they have the source to?
Well like I said this new article sparked more questions then answers. It was nice to see that they hooked up a 5-digit code to send videos to for uploading videos. This should make the expansion of social-video-networking go up quite a bit. It would be really cool, this is way out there, to have this fuel Verizon’s relationship with Adobe and push the Vcast system to use FLV (and Flash Lite 2.X/3.0???) instead of or in addition to the Mpeg4 based service of right now. Anything that pushes Flash forward on the mobile device arena is cool.
1 comment November 28th, 2006
Now I am from Vegas and have seen the MGM Grand web site for a while now. I believe its one of the greatest examples of Flash Video, Flash, and HTML. The experience and the navigation all comes together really nicely.
Edge newsletter “The edge of Flash”
Here is the site it self MGM Grand
3 comments November 15th, 2006
Just got a new dedicated box with Redhat ES4 on it. I needed to get Flash Media Server up and running on it and had a little bit of an expereince. Here is my steps with dependencies and quirks when trying to install and then run the server.
1. Downloaded FlashMediaServer2.tar.gz
2. tar -zxvf FlashMediaServer2.tar.gz
3. ./FMS_2_0_3_r68_linux/installFMS
4. This is where I got my first quirk, an error message about not having libstdc++.
5. Using up2date –showall | grep libstdc++
This will list compat-libstdc++-296, compat-libstdc++-33, libstdc++, and libstdc++-devel. The 2 non-compat packages where already installed so I installed the compat packages
6. up2date -i compat-libstdc++-296
7. up2date -i compat-libstdc++-33
8. ./FMS_2_0_3_r68_linux/installFMS (works this time)
9. I did all the deafults, as well as the default to start the fms service after installation
10. I tried to get a sample application to work and nothing.
Checked the /var/log/messages (or /opt/macromedia/fms/logs/admin.00.log) for the presence of text like “1174 _defaultRoot__edge1 1935″. If you do not see 1935 the fmsmaster script is not working properly.
A trip back to my previous post reminded me of the fms not working issue. It pointed
11. /opt/macromedia/fms/fmsmaster
Displays another error message about libnspr4.so. This error I had referenced in my previous post and went looking for nspr packages. The Fedora Core 2 fix was to have the mozilla-nspr package installed, well in ES4 its already installed. Some more searching…
12. up2date –showall | grep nspr
Lists mozilla-nspr and seamonkey-nspr packages
13. up2date -i seamonkey-nspr
14. up2date -i seamonkey-nspr-devel
15. /etc/init.d/fms start
That fixed the problem and got the server running correctly. This is more for my own good to remember how to do this the next time I need to install Flash Media Server, hope it might help somebody else in the process.
4 comments November 10th, 2006
Learn how to use Flex 2 and FMS 2 by creating a basic video conference application
Video over the Internet and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are the latest craze. With Flex 2 and Flash Media Server 2 (FMS), developers can easily create interactive media Web applications. In this article you’ll create a basic video conference application that will give you the foundation to take you to the next step.
Read more at….
http://mxdj.sys-con.com/read/295379.htm
Its a great article, but I am biased.
4 comments November 8th, 2006
I wrote an article called “Video Conference with Flex & FMS” for the latest issue of Web Developer’s & Designer’s Journal (Volume 4 Issue 10). This article was available in the printed version of the WDDJ during MAX at the ColdFusion Developer’s Journal booth. I am not sure when the article will be available on sys-con.com’s website.
The article walks you through how to create a video conference application using Flex and Flash Media Server (FMS). I have gone ahead and posted a live working example of the code on my site as well as the source code.
23 comments October 28th, 2006
At MAX you can pick up your copy of the lastest Web Developer’s and Designer’s Journal. The front page sports a picture of a web cam and the article title “Video Conference with Flex and FMS”. The crazy thing is I wrote the article. This is my first published article in the journal and I am pretty excited about it. If you are at MAX pick up a copy of the journal and let me know what you think.
Add comment October 25th, 2006
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