FlashConnections

Live chat about upcoming streaming workshop

lisa larson~kelley — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:39:57 +0000

Jan Ozer and I had a quick ooVoo video chat about our upcoming workshop, Streaming Production and Flash Seminar – March 23 in NYC. Watch it for more info about what we’ll cover!

Jesse Warden on OSMF, Adobe news, and skunked beer.

lisa larson~kelley — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:07:59 +0000

The always-entertaining Jesse Warden (JesterXL) shares some pearls of wisdom and some insights on getting started with the Open Source Media Framework. Enjoy.

The “Everything you need to know about video for Flash” workshop!

lisa larson~kelley — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:02:09 +0000

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 and third-party streaming (Influxis.com). 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.

Flash Media Server hosting and applications generously provided by

Fox and ABC dropping Move for Flash

lisa larson~kelley — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:13:44 +0000

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!

xmoovStream PHP video server

lisa larson~kelley — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:27:11 +0000

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/

PROFMediaPlayer: OSMF in action

lisa larson~kelley — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:35:53 +0000

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

I’m one of the “Women of RIA”!

lisa larson~kelley — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:28:03 +0000

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

Streaming Media West resources

lisa larson~kelley — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:13:02 +0000

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/

FMS shared objects? There’s an app for that!

lisa larson~kelley — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:03:50 +0000

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!

First MAX announcement: FP 10.1 features

lisa larson~kelley — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:43:54 +0000

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!)