Well, after an inspirational and informative intro to Flex 3 at last night’s FCNY meeting by Seth and Brian of 9Mmedia, I’m feeling ready to take the leap into Flex development!

My first project will be an ambitious one; porting my iFoxCam FMS application over to Flex and FMS3 (from, ahem, AS1 and FMS1.5). It’s about time, I say!

So I’ll be posting about video and data integration in Flex as I go along. Watch this space for tips and lessons learned.

What if you could create a dynamic Flash website without compiling, and without writing a lick of ActionScript?

And what if I told you that this site was fully standards-compliant, readable and indexable by search engines?

And what if this magic SWF-creator was completely open-source and available now?

Well, believe it my friends — Wrapper is here!

My friend and fellow FlashCodersNY member, Tyler Larson, has finally released his baby into the world, and has graciously decided to make it open-source. He presented to FCNY last night, explaining both the implementation and some of the inner workings, and showing some amazing examples.

An ActionScript 3 HTML/CSS rendering engine, Wrapper makes it simple to create attractive, functional, full-Flash websites using just standard HTML/CSS markup. Now, this may be hard to ‘wrap’ your head around at first, as it was for me, but once you see it in action, you begin to understand the power it gives you, and why Tyler’s been tirelessly working on it for lo these many months.

To see it in action, go to Tyler’s site: http://www.motionandcolor.com/
This site is constructed using Wrapper. Looks like a normal, slick site, right? Remarkably, the whole thing is a SWF, which was constructed using HTML/CSS (view the source).

Very basically, this is how it works: When this page is loaded into the browser, a javascript file, wrapper.js, is loaded. This file “eats” your HTML/CSS and renders all of your content into a SWF, which (using the standard SWFObject method) replaces the HTML and fills the browser window. All this happens instantaneously, as Wrapper is nicely optimized at a lean, mean 22k.

Some of the major benefits of Wrapper include:

• Dynamic loading of custom fonts, by importing a SWF with that font embedded
• Bitmap fills (and notice the nice smooth gradient background on the sample link above)
• Filters (shadows, glows, etc.)
• Draw shapes (basic primitives such as circles, squares, rounded rectangles, etc.)
• Standards-compliant
• Content can be indexed by search engines
• Can set up and call custom methods for more advanced interaction and functionality
• Open-source and free
• And much more, once you get under the hood…

So, if you’re interested in streamlining the development of Flash-based websites and want to produce Flash sites that are fully indexable and standards-compliant, check out Wrapper at Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/htmlwrapper/

or at OSFlash

http://osflash.org/projects/wrapper

p.s. There’s even a simple WordPress Theme example. Amazing stuff, Tyler, you rock!

A clever Flash/Flex/AIR developer, Benjamin Dobbler, has made some serious progress on a simple FLV editor, called RichFLV. This AIR app allows you to import multiple FLVs, trim them, splice them together, and export a new edited FLV. Check out the video to see it in action (and encourage him to release it soon!)

Next generation RichFLV preview

Share beta: Free Adobe service with 1GB of disk space; app for sharing files. Remembers who you shared your files with. Also “like flashpaper on steroids” letting you embed PDF content into webpages, etc. AS3 libraries also available to work with the service.

Pacifica: Voice, messaging, presence into Flash and Flex apps. High quality voice. Real-time collaboration
High Quality voice chat
Text instant messaging
NAT/Firewall Traversal
Ajax, HTML, JS, Flex, Flash
t/c video Chat
P2P
AIR
PSTN Access — connect into telephone network
Private beta starting this month, and hiring developers and quality engineers.
Will be open to developers to build custom apps.

CoCoMo: New version of Adobe Connect (Nigel Pegg)
Client UI has been rewritten in Flex (was Flash MX)
The worldwide hosted infrastructure will be opened to developers to access via Flex.
API/components will be available, along with the foundation classes
(Finally opening screensharing?) more in a few… battery’s dying!

The brilliant minds of Flash developers are always working… More proof here, on FlashcomGuru, where xmoov has developed an improved solution for emulating streaming’s smooth seeking, for progressive download video delivery. Like the solution mentioned in our book, this is PHP-based, and allows you to skip around freely within a progressive video, even if that portion of the video file has not yet been downloaded. He’s open-sourced the code, and also offers a plug-and-play version for a small fee, (UPDATE: contact the developer for pricing) if you don’t want to get your hands dirty with PHP.

The updated source by xmoov.com is available from FlashComGuru’s site.

With one earth-shaking announcement, Adobe has changed the landscape of online video.

Flash Player 9, Update 3 will support playback of H.264 encoded video in the following file formats:

- .MP4

- .M4A

- .M4V

- .3GP

- .MOV

It’s important to note that the video file must be encoded using the H.264 codec (FairPlay is not supported). All H.264 formats including Base, High, and High 10-bit streams will play.
What does this mean for you? Well, depending on your application and the demands of your video projects, it could be business as usual — or it could be a whole new business model.

Flash will continue to support both Sorenson Spark and On2VP6. Note that there are still reasons to use VP6; alpha channel video, for example. You also won’t be able to stream H.264 videos via Flash Media Server until a future version of FMS is released. Also, FLVs are built for fast-start streaming, where many H.264 videos are not. That being said, the benefits and opportunities that the new codec brings are huge.

You can now re-purpose existing H.264 content, and play it back in the browser WITHOUT any other special plugins. This means that iTunes files (with all metadata) can be played back through Flash. Videos with karaoke tracks or multiple-language subtitles encoded in can be read and and displayed in Flash. All of this (and more) in the browser, without any special codec or plugin downloads.

The big-picture benefits are clear: Adobe has given their customers what they’ve been clamoring for — a non-proprietary, standards-compliant video format. This gives them confidence that their often huge libraries of content are not held hostage by a single company and their player. It also gives us access to more encoding tools, a more flexible codec, and native hardware support.

All of this, and less than 100kb added to the Player!

There are two potential issues with this announcement that I’ll be keeping an eye on. One, there may be additional licensing required for H.264 video used for commercial content. The implications of this are not yet clear. The second is the assertion by Adobe that the Flash Player will not support playback of streams from non-Adobe H.264 servers. Though neither of these issues will likely become deal-breakers, they could prevent the industry from fully embracing the news.

Watch this space for more details, and what the new codecs will mean for you. You can bet I’ll be keeping up with the latest developments!

This update for Adobe Flash Player 9, code-named Moviestar will be available in beta later today on Adobe Labs. The full release is planned for later this fall.
More info:

What just happened to video on the web? — Tinic Uro, Adobe
Flash Player Supports H.264 Video — Ryan Stewart, ZDNet
Adobe Extends Web Video Leadership With H.264 Support — Yahoo News

On2 has announced today that they will add support for the H.264 codec (widely used for HD and mobile content, including iPods and iPhones) in their Flix video encoder. This additional transcoding format will be an available as an upgrade in Q4 2007. With companies such as On2 being compelled to support the iPhone video format, one wonders who’s going to blink first — will Adobe give in and add a codec, as Flashers have been clammering for, or will Apple finally support Flash on iPhones?! Somethin’s gotta give.

Finally! FMS developers now have a handy tool for writing communication ActionScript, thanks to Darren Lee — the Flash Media Server Eclipse Plugin

Features:

• Outline View
• Code Complete
• Output Console
• Auto Insert
• Import AS2
• Error checking

See a demo screencast here: http://fczone.com/eclipse/demo/

A tool to enhance FMS development workflow has sorely been needed. Darren has really outdone himself with this — it certainly helps that he has an amazing amount of first-hand knowledge about what FMS developers need. The code completion alone will save me tons of time, not to mention the tricked-out Output Console and error checking.
This is a test-build release, so be sure to check for the latest updates. Thanks, Darren! You rock.

We’re excited to be part of FitC again this year — and it’s shaping up to be yet another fantastic conference. Renee will be presenting “Flash Video Crash Course” and I’ll be “Demystifying FLV Encoding.” FitC is always chock-full of motivating and educational sessions, and a great group of people — don’t miss it!
Check out the details >> here <<… and when you decide to get your ticket, use this code for a discount:
10% discount code: HD777
See you in Hollywood!

The latest update to the Flash Player brings serious video quality improvements, for those who have the right hardware. In this video interview with Tinic Uro of Adobe, he discusses the specifics. Here are the highlights:

• Core renderer will now support multi-core hardware, giving us fully multi-threaded performance (so, if you have the right system, full-screen HD Flash video can be amazing quality, and screaming fast).
• The native resolution of the video in Flash is scaled up to full-screen through hardware acceleration.
• This hardware acceleration is implemented using OpenGL on Mac and Direct3D/DirectDraw on Windows.

Pretty exciting stuff, even though most of us don’t have the hardware to experience it just yet. Just more proof that Adobe is serious about video.