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!!

Thanks to everyone who attended my session yesterday morning at Flash on the Beach in Brighton, UK. As promised, here are all of the sample files, along with the presentation for your reference. I wish I’d had more time to show you the coolness of the DVR and Dynamic Streaming in all their glory, but I present them to you here to play with at your leisure. If you have any questions you didn’t get to ask, please post here and we can have a virtual Q&A

FMS_fotb09_preso.pdf

Dynamic Streaming and DVR code examples

Enjoy the rest of FOTB!

It’s sale time at Adobe, apparently! Found a couple of good deals, depending on your situation… thought I’d pass them along.

10% off any CS4 purchase, suite or individual product, full or upgrades: Enter code 10offAdobe at checkout to receive the discount!

Students: Adobe Back to School Source: studenteditions.adobe.com
Heading back to school? Then check out the Adobe Back to School Gallery for inspiration and low student pricing, including savings of up to 80% on Adobe Creative Suite 4.

Chaim Sajnovsky, a prolific contributor to the FlashMedia FMS mailing list and a FMS/Flash consultant, recently authored an informative article on working with video in ActionScript 3.0 that I just ran across.

It goes over the basics of NetConnections, NetStreams and Streams, and how to work with metadata.

You can find it on page 62 of the February issue. Download the PDF for free!

I’m presenting a half-day pre-conference workshop at this year’s Streaming Media West conference in San Jose, on Nov. 16, 2009: Developing a Rich Video Player for the Adobe Flash Platform. I presented this workshop a few months ago at Streaming Media East — the first time I had given more than a one-hour session — to a nice full room. Based on the feedback from that session, I’m fleshing out the workshop with more hands-on exercises and real-world examples.

Sign up now and get a $200 discount using this link: http://tinyurl.com/ldetsc

And remember, Streaming Media West also has an exhibit hall that is open pre-registered attendees for free! You can register for this free pass at the same URL above.

Hope to see you there!

It’s been a long time in the works… the Adobe Developer Connection has just published their whitepaper on “Large Scale Streaming Deployments on Flash Media Interactive Server.” While not a light read, it gives you (hopefully) all the information you need to configure and deploy large-scale applications with FMIS. I’ll be involved in updating the paper in the future as well, so please comment if you have any feedback on the contents. Happy reading!

http://tr.im/r8Ah

Time to trim a bit of fat, so I have moved my blog to a new, more affordable host. When you see this post, it means the transfer is complete! If you see any weird stuff with the blog, missing links, etc. please let me know with a comment so I can get it fixed before the old host is bye-bye. Thanks!

UPDATE: Oh, and it seems that I have lost all of the registered users. So you’ll need to sign up again so I have your info. Thx!

I’ve had several questions recently about how to add closed captioning to the Dynamic Playlist code in my tutorial on Adobe Developer Connection. I answered a comment on the article, but its not easy to find — so I thought I’d post it here to make it a bit easier.

Yes, this is pretty easy to implement, but is a bit nitpicky. Here’s how you do it.

Just add the URLs of the timed text files to the XML data for each video, like so:
<vid desc=”Popeye for President, Title and Credits”
src=”videos/Popeye_forPresiden256K_flash_popeye.mp4″
thumb=”thumbs/Popeye_forPresiden768K.jpg”
ttURL=”myTTfile.xml” />

Then, in the initMediaPlayer function, you’d just add it as an additional attribute (ttURL) in the ‘for’ loop so it can be loaded for each video as it’s clicked, like this:
tileList.addItem({label:item.attribute(“desc”).toXMLString(),
data:item.attribute(“src”).toXMLString(),
ttURL:item.attribute(“ttURL”).toXMLString(),
source:thumb});

Add these three new lines of code at the end of the initVideoPlayer function:
myVid.autoRewind = true;
myVidCaptioning.source = tileList.selectedItem.ttURL;
myVidCaptioning.flvPlayback = myVid;

And finally, replace the listListener event handler with the following:
function listListener(event:Event):void {
myVid.stop();
myVidCaptioning.source = event.target.selectedItem.ttURL;
myVidCaptioning.showCaptions = false;
myVidCaptioning.showCaptions = true;
myVid.autoPlay = true;
myVid.play(event.target.selectedItem.data);
}
The trick here is to hide then show the captions, so you clear out the data from the previously-selected video. It’s a bother, but this should take care of it.
Then, go into your FLA and drop an FLVCaptioning component onto the Stage, and give it an instance name of myVidCaptioning. Publish, and watch (and read) your videos.

Hope this helps… if you have any trouble…

… download the example code here (video files omitted; you can grab them from the original tutorial files or change the XML to point to your own).

Another option, of course, is to insert embedded cuepoints into your video files for your captions, then use the onCuePoint event handler and display them in a dynamic text box. This is a more custom approach, but the timed text file approach above conforms more to usability standards. Your call.

I had the privilege to present a session earlier this week at the FlashBelt conference in Minneapolis. It was my third year in a row being a part of this fantastic conference that is a labor of love for its organizer, Dave Schroeder. I had to leave the conference early this year, so I missed a lot of the social mixers and, most notably, the keynote that has unfortunately cast a pall on this year’s conference. (See http://bit.ly/PY4ty for all the gory details.)

Because I feel I know Dave well, and I was one of the female speakers at this conference, I feel the need to weigh in.

I’ve been speaking at tech conferences for several years now, often as one of only two or three female speakers. So I’ve experienced my share of misogyny, but also of proactive inclusiveness. I’ve had the perennial conversation with many of the conference organizers: “How do we get more women involved?!” They all say they can’t find females who are willing to stand up and speak. It is truly a chicken-and-egg problem. It stands to reason that a woman may not want to show up, let alone speak, if she feels she’ll be putting herself out there to be disrespected or objectified. It’s not easy being a woman in a field dominated by men, and in some cases, boys.

I know Hoss.  I’ve presented at conferences he’s been a part of several times. And, yes, he does seem to get a pass. “Aw, yeah, that’s just Hoss…” I’ve heard that more than once. To that point, let me share a couple of personal experiences I’ve had interacting with him.

My first encounter with Hoss was at the conference where I presented for the first time, with my female business partner. The sessions had just let out and there was a rush for the elevators. My partner and I were the last to get into a crowded elevator, and Hoss was the next in line. We squeezed back to make room for him, and he got a big grin and shouted to everyone within earshot… “Yeaaaah, I’m ridin’ with the LADIES!” and proceeded to press himself against us. We were of course disgusted and embarrassed, but as first-time speakers we didn’t want to make too much of a fuss. As women so often feel they have to do in business, we snickered and laughed it off. And just kept our distance.

The next time I crossed paths with him was a couple of weeks ago at another conference. Again, I was in an elevator, but this time I was there with my husband and 7 month old daughter. I had mentioned the previous elevator experience to my husband, so he was surprised when a quiet, respectful Hoss got in, nodded to me and smiled at our baby. We had a short conversation and he was on his way. This is the “teddy bear” Hoss that Dave refers to in his public apology, one that has a daughter of his own. (Based strictly on this interaction, who would have guessed he was on his way to show off his “orgasmatron”?)

So, yes, Dave should have been aware of the tone and content of Hoss’ presentation prior to inviting him to speak. But not for a second do I believe he would consciously condone discrimination, objectification, or abuse of a female attendee or speaker. I had to bring my daughter with me to this year’s conference and he bent over backwards to make things easy for us (you don’t see many babies at tech conferences, believe me). FlashBelt has always been the most gender-inclusive conference of its kind. I honestly believe that the reason this was sparked at THIS conference was primarily BECAUSE there were so many women in attendance. It would truly be a disservice to single out FlashBelt as “the” sexist conference. Dave has a big heart, and he just got a big lesson in trusting those who he thinks of as friends.

I tell you all this not to ratchet up the buzz, but to hopefully become part of a bigger solution. This stuff is always under the surface. The women know it; the men know it. It’s incidents like this that can raise consciousness, help trigger action and foster change. Let’s hope that’s the real take-away from this year’s FlashBelt.

If anyone has ideas to bring about a more gender-blind Flash community, please bring ‘em on. It’s 2009, already!