Thanks to everyone who chose to attend my FMS talk at FlashBelt this year instead of sneaking next door to see Grant Skinner!

I hope you all got something useful from the session, and really did walk away feeling empowered to take the dive into FMS development.

As promised, here are the slides and files from the presentation. Please let me know if you have any questions I didn’t answer.

SLIDES (PDF, sorry about the large file size)

DEMO FILES

Special thanks to the fantastic Influxis team for their great blog posts and examples on both DVR and Dynamic Streaming. (If you need FMS hosting, you’ll want to call these guys. Seriously.)

And kudos also to David Hassoun for his comprehensive articles and sample code (most of which I relied on heavily in my presentation).

Thanks again, and see you next year, Minneapolis!

Adobe evangelist Serge Jespers has outlined some of the most common myths about deploying video on the Flash Platform. I’ve run into these arguments often, so thought I’d pass on the link.

http://www.webkitchen.be/2008/12/23/8-misconceptions-about-flash-video/

cheers, and happy christmas!
// Lisa

Google has made a couple of big announcements in the past few days, all relating to new video features.

Gmail Video Chat
Today they announced that Gmail will now support a free, cross-platform “standards-based” voice and video chat. You need to install a custom plug-in, and the feature only works with Gmail in your browser.

The most interesting part to me is their use of H.264 encoding. We’ve been trying to get Flash to support that (or at least VP6) for some time now, but Adobe’s been reluctant to increase the size of the Flash Player to accommodate it.

More info: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/say-hello-to-gmail-voice-and-video-chat.html

YouTube Live
They are also working on live streaming on YouTube (possibly using a related plug-in?) This looks like it’ll be a service that competes with sites such as Justin.TV, Stickam, etc. The official launch is set for Nov. 22, so stay tuned for more info!
Post on AlleyInsider: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/youtube-plans-to-launch-live-streaming-november-22

My friends over at FlashBrighton just alerted me to this amazing use of video in Flash — this company has designed a camera system that records full 360° movies. You can actually click and drag while the video is playing, looking at the scene from every angle. You’ve gotta see this!

http://www.immersivemedia.com//index.php
My heart’s all a-flutter. Amazing stuff.

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!

This morning saw another new development in the Flash codec story.

On2 has announced support in their Flix encoder (and even more importantly, in Flash 9/Moviestar) for a new codec profile: VP6-S.

From the press release:

The new VP6-S video profile offers greater simplicity in the encoding and playback of high-resolution, full-screen video, thereby allowing high definition video to be streamed and played back within processor power limitations posed by the majority of personal computers. On2 will ship its flagship Flix Engine upgrade for VP6-S mid-October, concurrently with the Adobe Flash Player 9 update. The remaining Flix product line with VP6-S upgrades will ship during the fourth quarter of 2007.

The target of this new codec profile is high-definition/high bitrate video on machines with slower processors. The original codec, VP6-E is still the recommended format for typical video with bitrates at or below 500Kbps.
Flash video used to be simple… ‘Spark or VP6?’ No longer! Encoding is going to be a bigger and bigger issue with Flash video, as we get more choices, optimized for different deployments. This is great news, though, for audiences with slower, older machines. The Flash video experience is getting better and better for everyone!

{grumble}Now I need to go update my MAX presentation on encoding for next week, again…{/grumble}

!! UPDATE !!

I just spoke with Mike Savello of On2 about the details of this announcement.

Apparently, this new profile has been part of the Moviestar release from day one, but was overshadowed by the announcement of H.264 support.

According to Mike, where the new codec shines is in high datarate video / slow CPU environments. The VP6-S profile is much less complex than the standard VP6-E currently in the Flash Player 8. The videos do not increase in filesize, nor do they decrease noticeably in quality, but they consume less CPU overhead on playback. On2 will have more specific benchmark data at their booth next week at MAX in Chicago.

Beet.tv’s Andy Plesser recently interviewed Chris Hock of Adobe about the momentum building around live video on the web. With the free tool Adobe Flash Media Encoder, alongside the Flash Media Server, more and more opportunities are opening up to easily deploy live video using Flash. From this interview, it seems that live streaming is a real focus for Adobe, so expect more developments in this area in the future.

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.

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.