I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry, but as you've probably heard already it is now possible to incorporate screensharing functionality into your Flash and Flex based applications. This is pretty huge considering that developers have been asking for this feature for the best part of 10 year, but it's also a slight disappointment to see this feature tied to LiveCycle Collaboration Service (LCCS) and not as an inherent Flash Player feature which can be leveraged with other technologies such as Flash Media Server. All things considered though it is a step in the right direction. Will we see screensharing become usable with FMS one day? I'm not too sure...

UPDATE - FlashCamp Birmingham has now been postponed until March 2011

There's less than 2 weeks to go to Flash Camp Birmingham, right in the heart of sunny England. Ok, it may not be sunny but that's just one more reason to spend a day at the Birmingham Library Theatre. In case you have been thinking about attending I recommend you sign up right now and grab one of the FREE (yes free!) tickets and catch some of the great sessions by Seb-Lee Delisle, Niqui Merrett, Steve Carpenter and other well known figures.

Yours truly will be attending and I'm very much looking forward to catching up with old and new friends alike. Flash Camp Birmingham - Miss it at your peril. Register now.

We have another FMS User Group Event coming up on August 19th. This time the topic will be Flash Access, 'a robust content protection and monetization solution that lets content owners, distributors, and advertisers realize new sources of revenue by providing seamless access to premium content.  Sounds straight-forward enough, but have you ever wanted to ask the Product Manager specific, pointed questions to get answers that you can apply to your use case?  Well, now is your chance to do exactly that.'

Join Florian Pestoni, Principal Product Manager at Adobe, on the August 19th meeting of the FMSUG (http://fms.groups.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=post.display&postid=29673) for an in-depth Q&A session on Flash Access, the next-generation content protection and monetization system for streaming and download of premium video.

Do you have technical, roadmap, or licensing questions?  This is your chance to ask!  Please submit your questions to Josh Lucero (josh@realeyes.com) by TODAY Thursday, August 12th -- we may not be able to answer all questions, but we'll try to cover as much ground as possible. 

You can find more information about Flash Access on the product page (http://adobe.com/products/flashaccess) as well as online documentation (http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashaccess).

Times by Time Zone:
Eastern Time - 12:00 Noon
Central Time- 11:00am
Mountain Time- 10:00am
Pacific Time- 9:00am

There's a live online presentation about the new Strobe Media Playback player coming up tomorrow at the OSMF user group. Ovidiu Eftimie from Adobe's Strobe Media Playback team will be presenting the features of this new versatile "ready-to-go" video player. There'll be an insight into the roadmap for future additions to the player, and time to ask questions.

The presentation starts at 12:00 (West Coast), 20:00 (London), and can be accessed by anyone through this URL http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/osmf

You can find out more about Strobe Media Playback at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/strobemedia

It's time for another FMS Online Usergroup meeting. This month Jun Heider of RealEyes Media will give you the lowdown on Adobe Stratus and Flash Player 10 P2P. In particular he will show you how to create real-time, social, and media rich applications with a decreased cost of delivery and infrastructure investment. You will find out how to leverage Adobe Stratus and the new Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) to enable multiuser applications with shared video, voice, and data without all the load being placed on the Flash Media Server. This session will also cover what previously has only been whispered about regarding the new Groups functionality that enables amazing features such as Multicasting, Posting, Direct Routing, Object Replication, and Server Channels. The future of Flash Player peer-to-peer communication is here with Adobe Stratus and RTMFP.
The date is May 18, 2010 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (GMT-7 Mountain Time US & Canada), 12:00pm Eastern which makes it by my calculations 5:00pm British Summer Time, 6:00pm for most of mainland Europe. The Connect room for the meeting is here.

The second event is an online seminar by fellow community member Lisa Larson-Kelly on Wednesday, June 9, 2010. Lisa will introduce you to the fundamentals of Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), Adobe's standard video player libraries for building playback experiences and monetizing video on the web. She'll give you a high-level overview of why you'd want to use OSMF and what it can do, and then dive into its underlying structure and some simple sample code to get you started. This session is for beginner to intermediate programmers and web developers who want to gain a better understanding of OSMF, and how it can simplify media player development.

Register Now. Time abd Date for this one is Wednesday, June 9, 2010 11:00 a.m. PST

Adobe have made some announcements at this week's Streaming Media East Conference in New York and streamingmedia.com has some great coverage on that.

The two main topics are the announcement that Flash Access 2.0, Adobe's new flavour of DRM for Flash video, is now available. Previously known as Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, Flash Access 2.0 will enable publishers to encrypt content at source and deliver it securely to the end user. This is different to simply using RTMPE for encrypted streaming as not only the transmission will be encrypted but the actual content will be as well. Previously, with Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, this technique was only supported in AIR, Adobe's desktop runtime. But with Flash Player 10.1 it will also be supported in the browser based Player, and there are a bunch of new AS3 APIs to make this happen.

Secondly is HTTP streaming. This is also a new 10.1 feature and will allow transmission of video content over HTTP, with the difference that it is no longer a simple progressive download but will also support full seeking, live broadcasts and multi-bitrate switching. A real alternative to RTMP based streaming basically. What's more, the HTTP streaming module for on-demand streaming over standard HTTP servers will likely be free, whilst the live module looks likely to be a paid product.

As mentioned, more details are to be had in Tim's article on Flash Access and the Player roadmap as well as Troy's piece on Flash Access and HTTP Streaming.

Mark your calendar for tomorrow, April 20th, for another great Flash Media Server User Group Online Event.

Date and Time
April 20, 2010 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (GMT-7 Mountain Time US & Canada)

Location
https://admin.acrobat.com/_a201884106/fmsug
Phone Bridge Information will be available in the Connect Room

Speaker
Lisa Larson-Kelley
Adobe Community Professional

Agenda
Over 75% of web video today is delivered on the Flash Platform. Flash Media Server (FMS) is Adobe's streaming server that is powering this content delivery. The latest version of FMS provides robust, scalable live and on-demand streaming, along with powerful features such as real-time interaction, Dynamic Streaming, DVR functionality, smart buffering and more.

Attendees of this presentation will gain a deeper understanding of how the server works, what it can do, and how to deploy streaming media applications that leverage its features. We'll look at where files go and why, what you can do with server-side ActionScript and what it looks like, and even see how easy it is to create a custom 2-person videoconference. We'll also look at the pros and cons of various hosting solutions.

You'll walk away with an understanding of streaming on the Flash Platform, along with an overview of what is possible with FMS -- and how to achieve it.

Times by Zone:
9:00am Pacific
10:00am Mountain
11:00am Central
12:00pm Eastern

My friends Lisa Larson-Kelly and Jan Ozer are hosting a one day workshop in Manhattan on March 23rd 2010 covering streaming media production and Flash video delivery.

These guys truly know their stuff and I can only recommend taking part in this one-off event, especially if you are in the New York area and interested in all things Flash video. The course will not only include video production techniques and Flash Player development but also extend to encoding in H.264 for Flash, i-Pod/Phone/iPad and Silverlight as well as a Flash Media Server Crash Course, amongst other topics.

Sign up now and take advantage of the early bird pricing at $170 for any half day course, or $300 for the full day - a total steal if you ask me. For more information visit Jan's site.

There's an interesting online event coming up tomorrow as part of the Adobe Community Tech Wednesday. These are presentations that are normally covered by an NDA but tomorrow's event is open to everyone.
Sumner Pain will be presenting an Introduction to OSMF and it will be your chance to pose questions directly to the folks from Adobe. You can join at http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/techweds2009/ and the meeting will also be recorded for later playback.
Start time is 10:00am PT (Los Angeles -8:00 GMT) / 1:00pm ET (New York) which makes it 6pm here in the UK or 7pm in most of continental Europe.

I've just been sent information on the following free online event which covers new ways for Flex Developers to work with PDF documents.
In short, you can build a GUI in Flex to skin the PDF and how the user can access the document contents. The PDF can contain images, text docs, or any Flex/Flash content (such as a video player or game). The Flex navigators are the GUI for how the user accesses the content of the PDF.
There is potential that this will offer new revenue opportunities for Flex developers as agencies and company creative departments often use PDFs to distribute their marketing and promotional materials.

The event details are:

Join the Adobe Acrobat User Community on Wed. November 18, 2009 for a free eSeminar on how to create highly branded, custom PDF Portfolio layouts using Acrobat 9's ActionScript API and Flex. PDF Portfolios let you combine Flash/Flex/ActionScript with PDF to redefine what a document can be. If you are a Flex developer and are interested in leveraging your skills in a new and exciting way, this eSeminar is for you.

Overview
Free 60-min Acrobat 9 PDF Portfolios for Developers eSeminar with live Q&A

Date
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 Time 10-11am US Pacific (1-2pm US Eastern)

Free Registration
http://www.acrobatusers.com/events/1475/pdf-portfolios-developers

Very brief post: if you are interested in funding out more about the upcoming DRM features for Flash delivered through a new server called Flash Access then you should attend the next meeting of the FMS Online User Group. It takes place on December 3, 2009 and the time depends on where you are in the world :-)
Check the events page for upcoming details.

Just a quick heads up for those of you who are a) based in the UK somewhere around the Midlands (then again it's only an hour from Londontown) and b) are interested in hearing me talk about life as a Flash freelancer.
I'll be giving a small presentation with potentially a lot of Q&A which will cover why you would want to start working for yourself, when is a good time to do it, how you go about it, how to find work and a lot of other pros and cons of being your own boss which may help you in your decision making. The session should also be interesting for those who are already self employed. In all it will be a summary of tips and tricks I have learned (often the hard way) over many years.

The meetup is on Saturday, November 7th from 11am at Warwick University. Hope to see you there.

The title really says it all: Fabio's session titled Encoding Best Practices For H.264 Video Using Flash is - amongst many others - now available on Adobe TV.

I've not had a chance to watch it yet but feel free to leave comments below if you have. I'll definitely put it on my ever-growing MAX catchup list.

In what appears to be an on-purpose release of MAX related announcements ahead of the event which starts today in LA, Adobe have announced the latest version of Flash Player: version 10.1. Do not let yourself be fooled by the .1 release as this version is much more than just another point release, it is a huge upgrade to Flash and the entire platform, touching many parts and in particular mobile and media delivery. Justin Everett-Church has a great breakdown of all the new features.

Overview
I'm not quite sure where to start, but I'll have a try:
Flash Player 10.1 can be labeled as a 'real' fully featured Flash Player for mobile. It contains a lot of optimisations as well as new APIs that are directly aimed at breaking open the mobile device market for Flash - I think it's safe to say that the time for Flash on mobile has finally come.

Brilliant - those of us who cannot make it to MAX this year will have the chance to watch the keynotes live online - just register at max.adobe.com/online/.

MAX will be great this year and I highly recommend you catch the keynotes. I have a feeling there may be some cool announcements coming up...

If you are even remotely interested in or have to work with encoding video content for the web then you do not want to miss Fabio Sonnati's session at MAX. If his talk at last year's MAX Milan is anything to go by then this will be a very technical and highly interesting session.

To wet your appetite a bit, Fabio has prepared a video comparison demo which shows just what can be done with the right encoding parameters and some clever pre-processing. In his demo, Fabio has taken a music video from YouTube (original bitrate ~2MBit/sec) and re-encoded it at a mere 500 Kbit/sec. If you expect the re-encoded, low bitrate content to be of lower quality then think again.

And to find you how this was achieved and what technical tricks made me watch and listen to an entire Bjork video without complaints then you just need to get yourself down to LA for Adobe MAX 2009, and more specifically to Room 506 on 5th October at 2:00 pm. If nothing else you can enjoy Fabio's trademark Italian accent - but trust me when I say that Fabio's talk will not be the only item on the agenda to look forward to.

It's time for another Flash Media Server User Group Meeting, this time covering Adobe's Flash Media Interactive Server and Large Scale Deployments.

When: September 10th at 12pm EST and 10am MST (I think that makes it 5pm here in the UK).

Who: Presenter is going to be Nick Hippe who currently works at Adobe within their mobile and device division.

Where: Call in details will me available here at this link on the day of the event http://groups.adobe.com/posts/81ef708026

If you have a large scale deployment of Adobe's Flash Media Interactive Server when should you move to set up a clustered deployment? When should an origin/edge configuration be deployed?
Nick Hippe will discuss the basics behind implementing Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server in a large scale deployment. He will cover the fundamentals of an origin/edge configurations as well as recommendations for matching configurations to solutions. If you are want to learn more about the capabilities of FMIS in large scale deployments, this is the FMSUG meeting for you.

The 6th Adobe sponsored PokerCoder London Poker Tournament (ALPT VI) for Adobe web professionals is happening on the evening of Thursday 3rd September, 7pm at the Loose Cannon Poker Club near Cannon Street tube on the Circle and District lines.

There are a few places left but they'll go fast. The event is totally FREE to qualifying individuals, with Adobe laying out for the venue, the prizes and the bar tab. It's an excellent opportunity to network, socialise, tell Adobe what you think about their software (gets interesting after a few beers I can tell you) and generally test yourself and your friends out under pressure. Don't be put off if you've never played Poker before, well over half the attendees are always novices and they're usually the ones who end up winning.

The rules are simple, the dealers are on hand to give advise and there's a 15 minute lesson at the beginning for everyone. This is a strictly fun game only and you won't be playing with or for money, though we do lay on cash game tables later in the evening if you're feeling brave. It's great fun and really is the thinking man's card game. There's even a ticket for Flash on the Beach up for grabs thanks to John at Flash on the Beach. So get along to www.pokercoder.com and register before the last places go.

I'm not sure if I have or haven't blogged this once before, but a second time can't hurt anyway. I've just spent another half hour trying to get a simple SMIL file to work in conjunction with the FLVPlayback component. Normally this should be quite easy: you establish the rtmp address of the video you want to play, assign this as the source property of the FLVPlayback component and you're done. Like so:
To transfer this to a SMIL file (handy if you are looking to support Dynamic Streaming in FMS) you would do this:

Looks plausible doesn't it? Shame then this DOES NOT WORK. Did you spot the error? Yeah, I'm such a noob, it's obvious isn't it?

StreamingLearningCenter will be running two one-week streaming production courses to be taught by my friend Jan Ozer of streaminglearningcenter.com. The two hands-on courses, to be held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA (July 20-24) and Harvard in Boston, MA (July 27-31) and will cover streaming production from set design to encoding using equipment from vendors like Sony, Bogen and Photoflex, and production software from Adobe and Apple. Class sizes are limited to ensure active participation for all students.

On July 14th, David Hassoun will be presenting to the FMS User Group on available video players for a Video Player Showdown.

This session will be a discussion and dive into the multitude of video player options out there for streaming Flash Video content. This will be an open discussion about some of the various open source and other video players out there for developers to choose from. We will also discuss the customization capabilities and feature comparisons for some of the available players and factors that should be considered when choosing one. We will also compare to custom building your own player and the considerations, benefits and drawbacks of such.

If you are working with Flash Video and have ever asked yourself which video player to use, or should I just build one myself and where to start - this session is for you!

If you live in the UK or happen to be here on June the 16th then you could do a lot worse than to attend Flash Camp Birmingham. It's hard to believe but yes, life does exist on this island outside London (in fact I am living proof of it and Birmingham is only a short drive from where I live). I'm very much looking forward to this event.

The schedule looks really interesting, but then I would say that since I'm part of it :-) and will be sitting on a panel with both Mike and Simon to tell you a bit about the life of a Flash geek freelancer and maybe get some of you who are stuck inside an ActionScript-sweatshop (only kidding, we all know they only exist in London) interested in trying it on your own. As you may find out, it's not all that scary and quite good fun if you're the sort of type that is prepared to take what I think is a pretty small risk (who can't return to a full time job if they want to) in return for a lot of freedom.

Hope to see you at Flash Camp. Come and say hi. Big shout outs to Jodie who's doing a fantastic job organising this event alongside his real job (do you see where this is going?).

PS: sorry about the incorrect date on this post, I know... Issues after MySQL upgrade and no time to fix them atm - and no clue how actually :-)

The FMS Online User Group is holding its next meeting on April 15th. The topic this time is 'Transcoding/Video compression in the Adobe Suite', presented by Andy Beach who is the Director of Product Management at Inlet Technologies. More details here. Hope to see you there.

The Golf Masters is back in full swing at the moment and I've been told that the live coverage is very cool indeed. Joe Hakooz kindly emailed me and noted that "the Masters is again broadcasting live using Flash. It's a very interactive player and the video looks better than ever".

Unfortunately - as with many sporting events - the coverage is geo-restricted and I cannot watch it here in the UK. It's a real shame and doesn't reflect the global nature of the internet. What makes it worse is that you do not find out about this until you click one of the live feeds - couldn't they at least hide the links from me to make it less depressing?

For everyone that can see it - enjoy (and send some screenshots please). I'll watch it on TV in the meantime.

re:boot re:place is a dynamic interactive one-day event which explores cultural and commercial opportunities in the digital age.
The event will show how organisations are using technologies connected in innovative ways to enter into conversations with new and bigger audiences.
The event is being broadcast live all day today and online viewers and delegates will be able to interact via a live chat room (guess who built that one) projected onto the main stage. Maybe I'll see you there.

Lisa Larson-Kelley will be hosting an online event named 'FMS 3.5 for the Absolute Beginner'. The talk is part of the regular Adobe FMS Users Group meetings and takes place on February 27, 2009 from 9:00am - 10:00am PST.
"For those just getting started with streaming and want to start from square one, or just know enough to be dangerous, this session will cover streaming fundamentals, FMS 3.5 capabilities, server installation, and building a basic streaming media player in Flash CS4. Bring your questions, and walk away with a better understanding of streaming and real-time interactivity with Flash Media Server 3.5."

Full event details can be found here. I hope to see you there (if I finally make it this time...).

Here's an interesting video of a discussion on RIA technologies including Silverlight, Flex and AIR. Sam Stokes, academic developer/evangelist at Microsoft Corporation and Kevin Hoyt, platform evangelist at Adobe represented the two sides.
You can watch the video here - but be warned, the viewing experience isn't great, especially if you are on a Mac.

A few months ago I put together a website called BanterTV.com. BanterTV.com aggregates the BBC iPlayer Live streams and adds a chat interface to each 'channel'.

As today is Inauguration Day for president Obama it may be appropriate to announce my little project here and invite UK viewers (iPlayer streams are UK only) to join me on BBC 1 where Huw Edwards and Matt Frei present live coverage from Washington DC as Barack Obama is sworn in as 44th President of the United States and addresses the nation.

Watch the event live on BanterTV.com. Hope to see you there. Coverage in the UK starts at 4pm GMT.

Led by industry guru's Graeme Bull and David Hassoun, this new user group will focus on Flash Media Server technology and solutions. The group will provide a forum of support and education in online video streaming, creation of interactive video experiences, application development and idea exchanges and much more. Access the group now from www.adobe.com/go/fms_usergroup

This group will start as an online user group, and as membership grows, will split into geographical groups that can meet in person on a regular basis. It's all about idea sharing how to stream video better, how to build more stable media solutions, how to innovate user generated content and social experiences.

Member skills can range from the absolute beginner to the absolute guru. Together, the community will drive new resources and education at all levels and on all subjects related to online video and communication.

The online group will be compose of:
Monthly, online meetings with industry experts and adobe personnel
Discussion Area - ask questions, discuss topics, solve problems
Event Calendar - posting of user group meetings and other pertinent industry events
Reference Library - files, bookmarks, contacts, notes, pictures, and more...
Blog - an RSS feed to pertinent, industry blogs
Job Board - advertise job openings
Media Gallery - share unique video apps

I hope you will join the group. The first meeting is TODAY and to kick off the group and give you an overview of FMS 3.5. Details here.
See you there, I'll try and make it!

MAX Europe turned out to be a great conference and it was really nice to be able to catch up with so many old and new faces. I finally got to meet Fabio Sonnati whose session on H.264 encoding for Flash was packed with technical info and practical advice.
Being my usual lazy self I relied on others to log all the information, and it was of little surprise to me that my friend Tim Siglin did just that. Tim has an excellent summary of Fabio's session over at streamingmedia.com.