Version 0.9 of the Open Source Media Framework has just been released. For those who haven't heard about OSMF (formerly codenamed Strobe) yet, it is an ActionScript based framework to help facilitate the easy development of media players running on the Flash Platform. The framework is open source and supports not only video and audio playback but also other asset types such as images, SWFs and the like. It could develop into a de-facto standard for Flash based media player development.

With the 0.9 Sprint release the team have effectively locked the APIs in order to prepare for version 1.0.

Some of the new features in 0.9 include support for HTTP streaming (a sign of things to come), a SMIL plug-in and an OSMF Sample Player. There's also a comprehensive Developer's Guide in PDF format.

If you have plans to take a closer look at OSMF then now would be a good time as the 1.0 release is getting closer.

The Obligatory iPad Post

A picture says more than a thousand words (although these are very wise words).

Amongst all the noise that is currently being emitted after the jesusiPad announcement there are a also some high quality gems of content emerging, and Mike Melanson's piece on the different problems which the Flash Player solves when it comes to video delivery is one of them.

In particular Mike explains how a desktop video player and Flash Player differ. One obvious difference which surprisingly often gets overlooked, is that Flash Player is not just a video delivery medium but so much more than that. If you think back a few years there was barely any support for video in the Flash Player, and the only reason we hear so many complaints about its performance is due to the fact that so many people are using it these days. Flash has had an unprecedented growth curve when it comes to video delivery on the web, but it was a popular plugin way before then.
The issue Mike explains well in his article is that of users comparing apples to oranges a lot of the time: they compare a browser plugin to a desktop tool. In Mike's words, "a desktop player usually plays a linear media file from start to finish. Flash Player solves a different problem: It plays linear media files from start to finish while combining the video with a wide array of graphical and interactive elements (buttons, bitmaps, vector graphics, filters), as well as providing network, webcam, and microphone facilities, all programmable via a full-featured scripting language, and all easily accessible via a web browser using a plugin that most of the browsing population already has installed."

Mike's article in full can be found here. Please bookmark it and send to everyone who asks you next time: "Can you explain why a video player like VLC can play the same flv file with less CPU usage than the Flash Player?".

And the main takeaway: "The Flash Player works to solve the problem of making video accessible via the web browsing environment. In contrast, a desktop media player plays a file using a dedicated, single-purpose application."

Stratus 2 Released, Takes Peer to Peer in Flash to New Levels

Adobe have just announced the immediate availability of the version 2 of Stratus, an update to the existing Peer 2 Peer rendezvous service that was launched in 2008.

In Adobe's words: "Adobe Stratus 2 enables peer assisted networking using the Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) within the Adobe Flash Platform. The most important features of RTMFP include low latency, end-to-end peering capability, security and scalability. These properties make RTMFP especially well suited for developing real-time collaboration applications by not only providing superior user experience but also reducing cost for operators."

While this sounds like the same capabilities that the previous version of Stratus offered it contains some significant updates, the main one being support for RTMFP Groups. [More]

I've just received an interesting email from Jaromir Sivic, a czech developer who sent me news about a project of his called 'Radical Flash Chat'.
While I haven't tried myself yet, Jaromir describes it as a framework that enables PHP and ASP.NET developers to build and manage their own Video Chats, Flash Chats and other multimedia videconferencing applications easily in a very short amount of time. The configuration screen certainly looks quite promising, listing both Wowza and Red5 as a Media server option. There's also an online demo that you can try (that's if it is online, which seems to be fairly intermittent).

I encourage you to try Jaromir's product and share your feedback with him, or indeed below in the comments.

I'm happy to post any news about similar projects or other news items, just drop me an email.

New Media Server Releases: FMS 3.5.3 and Wowza 2.0

I'm very late with this piece of news, I know, but in case you haven't heard both Adobe and Wowza have released updates to their respective Media Server technologies. I must admit that one of these updates appears more significant than the other as Wowza have pushed out a major new version with Wowza Media Server 2.0.

Before I outline the details of that though let me first point you to the newest updater for FMS, bringing it to version 3.5.3. As always you can grab the file right here.
This version of FMS is essentially a service pack which includes bug fixes and performance improvements for DVR, Dynamic Streaming and playback. It even includes security fixes to correct some critical vulnerabilities.
The FLVCheck tool also saw an update, and Flash Media Server 3.5.3 now has full support for the smart buffer management controls introduced in Adobe Flash Player 10.1. These controls include support for seeking within the buffer, stepping through a video, slow and fast playback in the buffer as well as re-establishing a connection without interrupting the stream. You can find more details about the buffer enhancements in the Flash Player 10.1 ActionScript 3 API documentation that's now available on Labs.

The team at Wowza has been very busy too and released a massive update to their Wowza Media Server, updating the platform to what they describe as a Unified Media server. Unified because Wowza can now stream not only to Flash clients but also supports iPhone, Silverlight and even IPTV clients. Not too shabby!
In terms of transport mechanisms this means Wowza now supports Adobe's RTMP based protocols, Apple's HTTP Streaming, Microsoft's Smooth Streaming, RTSP/RTP delivery for Apple QuickTime, mobile and other clients as well as MPEG-TS for IPTV set-top delivery. The full press release is here.

I think it is awesome to have this kind of competition in the market and the work that the relatively small team at Wowza is churning out will certainly give Adobe some food for thought, especially when it comes to interoperability with other runtimes and platforms. I think if I was in Adobe's shoes I'd reach into my pocket and make them an offer they can't refuse - before somebody else does.

Up to now Adobe has been offering the free Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE) only as a Windows tool - but this is soon going to change.

The recently announced FMLE 3.1 for Mac OSX will finally bring this essential tool to the Mac platform. This can't come soon enough as it has been requested for a very long time.

FMLE 3.1 for Mac will work with the built-in iSight camera as well as devices such as Firewire cameras and video capture cards to support a broad range of use cases and workflows. Like the Windows version, the Mac version of FMLE 3.1 will be free.

A release date has not yet been announced, but you can register an interest in a private beta by signing up here.

Flex Help Needed - Issues with Image Canvas

This is what happens when you stand on the shoulders of giants - you don't quite know what you are doing, at least in my case.
I've been working on a way to dynamically load images into a Flex app and set them as the tiled background of a Canvas component. Luckily I spotted creacog's work which I adapted a little bit for my needs. You can see the results here.

So far the image loading and displaying as a borderskin of the Canvas works, but as you can see when you drag the box around is that as soon as scrollbars appear the image is no longer rendered and the Canvas's background color it displayed instead.

I'd appreciate any tips on this. You can see the sources by right-clicking the app or directly from here (the .zip is here).

Feel free to use and reuse this code if you find it useful, and remember to credit creacog.co.uk who has done the hard work on this.

I'm a little surprised that I had to pick this info out of an Amazon email newsletter as this seems to be pretty major news to me. What is Adobe's PR department doing to not send me some up-front info on this?

Anyways, Amazon Web Services is now offering a CloudFront based streaming service (supporting audio and video) that is powered by Flash Media Server. What this means is that everyone can now have an on-demand, highly available and highly scalable audio and video streaming CDN at their finger tips. How does this differ from traditional CDNs? The main difference is that you are only charged for actual usage, there are no tie-ins or long term contracts as is the case with most (if not all) of Amazon's Web Service offerings. Depending on Edge Server location the fees start at around $0.17 per GB of transfer up to the first 10TB used, then decrease as data usage rises.

What is interesting from a Flash developer's point of view is that Amazon's streaming server of choice which has been rolled out on a massive scale here is Flash Media Server. It should be noted that this service can only be used for on demand and live streaming, so allows no server side code or RTC based apps which include any server side logic.
You can find more info here.

Introducing Adobe's Open Source Media Framework (OSMF)

There's an interesting online event coming up tomorrow as part of the Adobe Community Tech Wednesday. These are presentations that are normally covered by an NDA but tomorrow's event is open to everyone.
Sumner Pain will be presenting an Introduction to OSMF and it will be your chance to pose questions directly to the folks from Adobe. You can join at http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/techweds2009/ and the meeting will also be recorded for later playback.
Start time is 10:00am PT (Los Angeles -8:00 GMT) / 1:00pm ET (New York) which makes it 6pm here in the UK or 7pm in most of continental Europe.

The guys are Wowza continue to be hard at work pushing their platform - with good success as it turns out. They took first place in two categories at the Streaming Media Reader's Choice Awards for Best Streaming Innovation and Best Server Hardware/Software.
"The Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards are the only awards of their kind in the online video industry," says Streaming Media magazine editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen. "While other awards focus exclusively on content, this is the only awards program that honors the technology that makes it all possible, and it's definitely the only one where the people decide who wins. And this year, more than 5,000 votes were cast for more than 200 nominees. Clearly, people care deeply about the tools they use to get their jobs done."

The full press release is here. Well done and well deserved guys, it's amazing what a dedicated team can achieve.

Installing ColdFusion 9 on Windows Server 2008 64bit

This blog is slowly turning into a ColdFusion site it seems :-) Blame ColdFusion for that, it's the one application server that I know a bit about and I really like working with.
Today I needed to install CF9 on Windows Server 2008 64bit and I ran into a few issues which forced me to reinstall a few times. I've now managed to install it successfully so here are a two tips that may safe you some hassle if you like me encounter a HTTP Error 404.3 - Not Found.

First off, I was using IIS 7.5. As you may know, you need to install the web server role onto Windows Server 2008 first and it seems that everything labeled IIS6 tools and compatibility tools should be installed as well, so do that first. Then when running the CF installer right click and 'Run as Administrator'. Once I did that it was plain sailing, but not much joy without those two boxes ticked.

Very brief update on my recent post in regards due the Flash Senior Solutions Architect roles which Akamai is trying to fill. In addition to Munich position they are also looking for candidates to work in New York City and San Mateo, CA. Please refer to the original job ad for the full job description and apply through that if you think you have got what it takes ;-)

Dynamic Bitrate Streaming Demo

I'm finally finding a bit of time (at 10pm) to upload a little video demo that had been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of months. The premise was that I wanted to have a play with the new dynamic bitrate streaming feature in Flash Media Server so I grabbed a trailer from Apple's website, fired up Flash Media Encoder and encoded the District 9 HD clip into 3 bitrates to .f4v format: 400kbps (low bitrate), 800kbps (medium bitrate) and 1.5mbits (high bitrate).
Video quality was not my primary goal here (as you can probably see from the footage), instead I just wanted to see how hard or easy it is to get something like this up and running. Bottom line: not too difficult at all.
I've got a copy of FMS 3.5, a dedicated server (UK based) with a decent bandwidth allowance so I figured why not release this into a the wild?
One thing that you should pay attention to is the actual bitrate switching. If your connection speed is very stable then you may right-click the player and choose to manual switching - let me know if you can tell when the delivered bitrate changes, I bet you can't. And that's the beauty of this technology in a nutshell: seamless switching between bitrates. Pretty neat. Note you can also click the little HD icon/bandwidth bar to bring up a console with stats about the video and playback.

I'm sure some of you will ask for sources, but to be honest there aren't really any to share. I just grabbed the Open Video Player and configured it completely via flashvars, so I have not even got a FLA I could show you. As for the video settings I used - sorry but I can't honestly remember. All I recall is that I downsized the clip a bit so the resolution is not the same as in the original source footage, and no other fancy settings were used. As I said I simply encoded using the Flash Media Encoder.
Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

I'm saying it's a bug because I think it should work differently to what is happening in my application.
I was trying to create a background image from a Flash MovieClip asset for a Flex UI component (for arguments sake I am using a VBox in this example) and could simply not get the slice-9 grid that I had defined in Flash be picked up in Flex.

I'm using the Flex 3.2 SDK and the only way to get my graphic to scale as expected was to use the original PNG. Anything I tried via the SWF asset would not work, including defining the scale 9 grid in CSS in Flex.

Here's my example app (I used one of Arals' tutorials as a basis). Please view source on my app and tell me why this isn't working, because I do not understand it. What am I missing?