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.

Brian Chau has graciously offered up some sample apps to get you started with FMS3 (they are exercises for his upcoming class). These come set up to run on FMS3 running locally (the free Developer edition would work for this).
http://brianchau.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/flash-media-server-3-demos/

He’s got some interesting apps in there, that take you a step further than the sample apps that come bundled with FMS3:

• VOD/LIVE player (with playlist) – AS3 SWF, and an AIR app
• Video Recorder
• Multi-user Game
• Flash Lite 3 video player

Thanks, Brian!

Last fall I presented “Fun with Flash Media Server” at Flash Forward Boston. For those of you who weren’t able to make it to beantown, Lynda recorded the session and has added it to the Lynda.com library! If you’re not already a member, it’s just $25/mo. for unlimited online tutorials (on a wide range of subjects, not just Flash). If you are a member, here’s the direct link to my talk:

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=552

Enjoy!

Last night I gave a talk about the new FMS3 to my friends at FlashCodersNY. (“uncensored” refers to the fact that last time I talked about FMS3, a few weeks ago, I couldn’t talk about most of the details!) I basically outlined the new features, what I thought about them, and how they might be helpful/valuable. I included a bunch of info from the upcoming whitepaper I wrote for Adobe, which should be publishing to the Developer Center shortly. (Will let you all know when it does!) In the meantime, here is the preso for reference.

I exported this to a SWF from Keynote, so you’ll have to click to move forward through the slides, and there’s no back button (grr). But anyway, here it is.

Today’s the day… FMS3 is here! In response to market pressures and lots of feedback from the developer community, Adobe has broken FMS3 up into three different editions:

Flash Media Interactive Server (FMIS) – $4500
Featuring full functionality of FMS, with customizable server-side code, Origin-Edge configurations, access control APIs, redirection support, server-side video recording, distributed core processing, and more. FMIS is ideal for large-scale deployment, developing custom video and communication applications, or enhancing your live or on-demand streaming apps with interactive functionality. It features everything we are used to in FMS2, and more.

Flash Media Streaming Server (FMSS) – $999
FMSS is the most economical if you just want to stream and protect your video. It comes pre-configured with live and ondemand applications, or ‘services’ as they are now being called. These are non-customizable FMS applications that allow you to stream content, right out of the box. Everything you need to stream video is included, such as H.264 support, high performance, enhanced seeking, encrypted streaming, multiple bitrate, and advanced tracking and reporting.

Flash Media Development Server (FMDS) – FREE
Available for free, this edition allows you full server functionality for developing advanced streaming or social applications. (There is a capacity limit of 10 simultaneous inbound connections.) FMDS can even be used to leverage the new multi-point publish feature which allows you to create a live publishing point, inject metadata into the stream, then push the video up to a content delivery network! Did I mention it’s free?

All three editions of FMS3 feature a wealth of new features such as:

• New real-time encrypted communication channel (RTMPE Protocol)
• Enhancements in content caching
• Connection throttling
• Stream data access (allows you to take snapshots from a stream)
• Authorization plug-in API for stream security
• Better quality of service for live streaming with data keyframes
• Better DRM framework of encryption and access control
• New File adapter API, allowing for remote content caching
• New support for mobile streaming to Flash Lite 3
• New AMF3 support to send complex data to clients
• New IPv6 support
• Complete support for legacy FMS2 applications
• Easier to deploy, with new services, improved documentation, and pre-configuration
• Significantly optimized server performance

And best of all –

• UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH AND CONNECTIONS (FMIS + FMSS)!

So go download your FMDS (as soon as everyone else is done…) and try out the new features for yourself. I’d love to have your comments here about the new editions, and how they are working out for you.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/

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

I just had the pleasure of presenting at the Digital Media Festival, an annual festival geared toward animators, digital effects artists, and video professionals. There was a great turnout on the exhibition floor, often with standing-room only attendance for the numerous free sessions at the Adobe booth. The masterclass sessions were also well-attended; I presented full-hour sessions on Flash Media Server, Flash video basics, and a session on Flash video: beyond the basics which explored the possibilities of alpha channel compositing, metadata and cuepoints among other features.

It was truly a pleasure to be working with Adobe to present intro sessions at their booth, as well as being a part of this diverse conference. As promised, I’ve uploaded copies of my presentations for reference, as well as all of the source code for examples shown.

http://www.flashconnections.com/dmf_2007/

Thanks to everyone; I hope you found the sessions inspirational as well as informative!

Now, I’m finally off to my honeymoon for a couple of glorious weeks “down under.” Have fun, and keep Flashing!

cheers // Lisa

What can I say about FOTB08… John Davey knows how to put on a conference. It was a solid 4 days of workshops, sessions, networking, commiserating, and drinking of pints. Lots and lots of pints.

The speaker lineup was stellar. It was truly an honor to be a part of it this year. So when I say DON’T EVEN THINK about missing it next year, I mean it! It’s planned for late September, so watch http://www.flashonthebeach.com for official info soon.

Thanks to everyone who attended my session, Fun with Flash Media Server. And oh boy was it fun… especially when we all lost the internet connection when it was time to demo my app. Ah well, gotta live life on the edge, right?! So to help make up for that, I’ve left the demo app running for you to play with; just please be kind to my server.

You can also download the source files for the application. Just remember to change the NetConnection URI to your own FMS server. (If you don’t want to set up your own version of FMS, the code is also compatible with other streaming servers such as RED5 or Wowza; or you could sign up for a dev account with Influxis). The presentation itself is available for reference as well, as promised.
See you next year (or sooner, if you happen to be in Sydney… that’s where I’m headed next. Will be arriving there this Sunday for the Digital Media Festival)!

cheers

// Lisa