 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
home
|
 I'll be attending FOWA (Future of Web Apps) this week. The event takes place at London's Excel and Adobe is one of the major sponsors.The speaker lineup is also very impressive and includes Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Kevin Rose (digg) and Tim Bray (Sun Microsystems), to name but a few. Are you attending? I'd love to hook up and I'll be there on the Thursday. Adobe is also running an AIR app competition and I'm inclined to enter an idea... See you at FOWA.
Some people have asked me to post my slides from my session at Flash on the Beach.
Here they are. I've also thrown in some sample applications - check out 'simple chat' if you are new to FMS since it contains several common mechanisms such as SharedObject use, NetConnection.call and Client.call Download the slides here (10.5MB PDF and sources).
As you may know I am spending the main part of this week at Flash on the Beach in Brighton. If you don't know what Flash on the Beach is, it's the biggest Flash (and Flex, AIR etc) conference in the UK, if not Europe. It's also the best conference of the whole year in my calendar. I presented my session on monday right after the keynote so I am now free to enjoy the conference fully. While attending some of the sessions I gathered a few interesting bits of information, some of which may not have been public knowledge before.
 Today - as you probably know - is CS4 day. As part of the CS4 suite, Flash also got an update and with it ships the new Adobe Media Encoder (with Flash CS4 Professional that is). Not only has the encoder changed its name slightly, it has also seen a feature update and got new UI that is now more in line with the CS4 interface (click for screenshot). In fact it is the same tool found in other Adobe professional video products such as Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 software and After Effects CS4 -- and it now supports H.264 encoding, and includes support for batch processing and also adds two-pass, variable bit-rate encoding. This is certainly a step up and brings it very close, if not on par, with dedicated and professional encoding tools. Or put it this way, Adobe Media Encoder will suffice most standard encoding tasks for web based video. Nice one.
Adobe today announced the Flash Media Encoding Server at IBC. This is a new scalable, high-performance solution for converting multiple video file formats to Flash video (FLV/F4V) and the latest addition to the Adobe Flash Media Server family of products. The solution is powered by Rhozet, one of the leading providers of transcoding solutions.
At IBC2008, Adobe is also previewing new technologies that will be available in future versions of Adobe Flash Media Server. These include dynamic streaming for delivering the highest quality, uninterrupted viewing experience, and the ability to pause or rewind a live video stream. Expect more news from IBC over the coming days. Full press release here.
If you have - like myself - promised to eat your left shoe if Microsoft does not add H.264 support to Silverlight (a codec which Flash has been supporting for some time now) soon then you are officially off the hook now. Unsurprisingly, later this week Microsoft will demonstrate the playback of H.264-based video in Silverlight. What else will they be adding? You guessed it, AAC audio support. Where did I come across that before... oh yeah that's right: Flash.
You can read more about it here (it appears to be Microsoft's own press department posing the questions in this Q&A so don't expect anything too objective...), and no doubt there'll be a lot of press releases coming out of IBC later this week.
I know I am late blogging this but initially I didn't think it was that big a deal. A press release made the rounds outlining Adobe's deal with the NFL to stream the NBC Sunday Night Football games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com live using Flash video. As some of you may know, NBC covered most of the Olympics in North America using Silverlight technology.
Several sites were quick to announce that NBC Dumped Silverlight and that they ran back to Flash, and while the story is certainly a big achievement for Flash as a platform I don't think that any other technology got dumped during the proceedings. Remember, the Olympics are over - and the initial arrangement between NBC and Microsoft covered the Olympics - not the NFL, not the Premier League, not the annual nativity play. It's great to hear of another major achievement for our beloved platform but I think we should chill out a bit and take the announcement for what is is, and not for what can be read into it. I bet Silverlight just needs time to mature... ;-) If you are blood thirsty then here's more for you.
 Adobe is discontinuing the development of FlashPaper, effectively killing the product. While always living life as a bit of niche product I found it extremely versatile and especially useful to convert Powerpoint documents to SWF. Many sites still rely on this capability for showing documents in a Flash friendly format. There have always been doubts about the future of FlashPaper ever since the Macrodobe merger and this recent announcement confirms that those doubts were valid. Farewell FlashPaper, I'll most certainly miss you.
 As you may know, this website (Flashcomguru.com) is quite a personal affair. It's not a company website nor is it a place where I reach out for work and I intend to keep it that way.Nevertheless a lot of the work I take on (yes, I do take on some which some of you won't believe ;) is a result of this blog, the content that's on here and subsequently the traffic I get from many direct links as well as the almighty Google (I just realised that I come up third for the term 'flash video' right after the Wiki entry and Adobe..!). Do you gather that I don't check my web stats very often? Anyway, back on topic. I get a lot of work through my blog yet I do not trade as Flashcomguru, in fact I kind of hate that label since it suggests that I am some sort of guru and so full of myself that I would call myself one - which isn't the case. The name was meant to be for the site, not me, and came as a result of Flashcomstudio.com (hands up if you remember) and in hindsight I wish I had chosen a different name. But that's water under a bridge now. Ok, I am off topic again...
|
|
