Along with streaming media luminary Jan Ozer, I am presenting a one-day intensive workshop on “Streaming Production & Flash Delivery” to be held on March 23, 2010 in New York City.

DETAILS and REGISTRATION: Streaming Production & Flash Delivery Workshop – Eventbrite.

If you need to brush up on any part of the workflow involved in getting video on the web, this workshop is for you.

Jan will cover the production end of things with “Production for Streaming” and “Encoding H.264 video for Flash, iPod/iPhone/iPad and Silverlight.”

I will cover the technical end of things with a morning session “Flexible Protocols and Custom Player Development” which gets you up to speed on the various delivery methods now available in Flash (including adaptive streaming via HTTP Streaming, P2P via RTMFP) and custom video player development for both the programmer and the non-programmer using Open Source Media Framework. Then in the afternoon I present a “Flash Media Server Crash Course” which will get you going with FMS with a full understanding of how to set up the server, what it can do, and how to do it.

Sign up now before it sells out… we are only presenting one day of training this time around, and there is limited seating!

Streaming Production & Flash Delivery Workshop – Eventbrite.

This morning’s VideoNuze email brought some good news for Adobe:

Fox Switches from Move to Flash; ABC Plans Transition Too.

Looks like the gamble on adding HTTP Streaming to Flash Player has paid off. The advantages of the Move Networks solution just didn’t add up for the premium price tag. Congrats, Flash Media team!

For those of you seeking (ha!) a solution for progressive video seeking, you’ll definitely want to take a look at the xMoov Server (formerly xMoov-PHP). It’s a free, open-source solution for accessing parts of your video that haven’t yet been downloaded — mimicking the seeking behavior of streaming (alá YouTube). It ships with a prebuilt audio and video players so you can get started right away (but of course

It supports Flash, Quicktime X, and Apple iPhone delivery, and can deliver virtually any type of file, not just video. It is released under a non-commercial license, so if you have ads on your site or want to use this for a client project you’ll need to buy a license. But at $50 for a single server, it’s very reasonable.

http://stream.xmoov.com/

Nicolas Prof has developed an open source, flexible and customizable video player based on the latest sprint (0.8) of the Open Source Media Framework (formerly codenamed Strobe). It supports both progressive and streaming. Because it’s built on the OSMF framework, you can expand the functionality and add plug-ins from the framework into this player.

A quick test of the PROFMediaPlayer

I thought I’d take it for a spin, so I downloaded the source and opened up the project folder. There’s no readme, so, like everything else with OSMF right now, it takes a bit of feeling around to get started.

There is a FLA with customizable assets in the Library. That seemed like a good place to start. (Nicolas has also included a layered Photoshop PSD file that you can use to edit the skin assets which was a nice addition.)

To customize the player size, background color, source video, etc. you can use flashvars or assign the values in the code, in the EmbedPlayer class. (e.g. settings.url=”myVideo.flv”).

I found that the PROFMediaPlayer really gives you a good starting point with OSMF, rather than starting from a blank class file and figuring it all out on your own. You can download the code at the link below; let me know if you think it’s helpful in exploring OSMF:

PROFMediaPlayer | Nicolas Prof blog

Big thanks to Amy Blankenship at InsideRIA for including me on their list. I’m in good company.

http://www.insideria.com/2010/01/the-women-of-ria.html

Yesterday’s half-day workshop on “Building Rich Media Players on the Flash Platform” in San Jose was a great success. Thanks to everyone who attended! As promised, here is the presentation file and the code examples. I did include the OSMF examples along with instructions to configuring Flash Professional CS4 to work with them. If you have any questions that you didn’t get a chance to ask, or run into any trouble with the examples, please comment below and I’ll try to help.

Presentation [PDF]

Player code examples [ZIP]

OSMF code examples [ZIP]

UPDATE 11/19/09: Forgot to supply the link I promised to R Blank’s free online seminar on OSMF (which was a great help to me in preparing my examples; thanks, R!) Here is a link, along with some updates to the code he demonstrated: http://www.rblank.com/2009/11/10/quick-note-on-osmf-0-7/

Stefan Richter, of flashcomguru.com fame, has made history by porting his Flash Media Server-based Fridge Magnet game to the iPhone. This was featured in yesterday’s keynote at MAX, but unfortunately too many people were on the wi-fi, so they weren’t able to show it on stage. But apparently it was immediately downloaded and played by numerous people (who proceeded, of course, to spell out naughty words!)

This is a groundbreaking moment — shared objects working on the iPhone. Who’d have predicted that?! So a big congrats to Stefan for being the first FMS-to-iPhone developer. Now go support him by downloading the app and giving it a go!

The new Flash Player 10.1 features will include some iPhone-like features such as accelerometer support, multi-touch, gestures and screen orientation, but no announcement yet about iPhone support — only support for just about every other smartphone (including Palm OS — hurrah!)

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-adobe-extends-full-flash-to-just-about-every-phone-but-the-iphone/

More tomorrow after the keynote.
(No, I’m not there unfortunately, but watching the broadcast. So I’ll try to interpret the announcements as they relate to Flash video since I can’t scoop!)

To be officially announced Oct 5, an upcoming version of Flash Player will support “ultra smooth” HD playback using GPU acceleration with almost every Nvidia GPU supported, even on smartphones.

http://gizmodo.com/5370126/gpu+accelerated-flash-player-provides-smooth-hd-video-arrives-next-month

Well, I’ve made it back home from my second Flash on the Beach conference, held in beautiful Brighton, UK. As expected, this year’s conference did not disappoint! Legends were born (Joa), controversies were kindled (Craig), and F-bombs were lobbed (Hugh, Stacey, Josh, Peter….etc etc). I was inspired once again by Hillman Curtis, by Joel Gethin Lewis, and by Craig Swann who showed us how important it is to “question everything” (as many of the attendees apparently took to heart!)

John Davey, his wife Jo, and his fantastic event staff pulled off the sold-out conference without a hitch. I’m in awe that they can run things so smoothly, and make it look so easy. I traveled there with my whole family (yes, 10-month-old and all) and John made us feel like royalty! He values his attendees just as much and bends over backwards to give them a content-rich conference, and a good time to boot.

This is one of my favorite conferences not just because John considers us all to be family, but because of the stellar content. The talent featured in the speaker lineup is amazing. I’m truly honored to be counted among the speakers at FOTB.

Mark your calendars for next year. I know the economy sucks. I know budgets are tight. But let me tell you, this conference is worth every penny (or pence)  you spend to get there, so don’t miss Flash on the Beach 2010!

p.s. And of course, I owe a huge thank you to all the fellow-speakers who helped me ring in my extra-special birthday celebration on Wednesday night/Thursday morning — especially to Niqui Merret and to Chris Pelsor for all the champagne and my flaming drink (I *may* still have the tiki mug…) You rock!!