I've just stumbled over this in the release notes for player 10 Beta:

File Reference runtime access -- Bring users into the experience by letting them load files into your RIA. You can work with the content at runtime and even save it back when you are done through the browse dialog box. Files can be accessed as a byteArray or text using a convenient API in ActionScript without round-tripping to the server. You no longer have to know a server language or have access to a server to load or save files at runtime.

That's yet more big news. Saving actual files locally? Load files into the app without going through a server first? WOW! Combine this with video downloads and P2P...

Hank Williams even thinks that this technology could kill CDNs. I'm not sure if I agree with that totally, but it will have an impact no doubt. It remains to be seen how restrictive or open this new API really is. But we will have fun over the coming months, that much is clear.

Oh, and it looks like I was right about the multi bitrate support too. :-)

Good morning coders, and what a morning it is. There's some huge, huge, huuuge news. Did I mention how huge this is?

Flash Player 10 Beta has just dropped on Labs and while the most hyped features center around 3D support and custom filters (amongst other things), there's also a goodiebag full of toys for the audio/video crowd.
How do you fancy some UDP? Peer to peer? Speex audio codec support (finally!)?

Let's dig a little deeper. The new rich media features in Flash Player 10 beta cannot be leveraged until the next version of Flash Media Server ships (this is likely to be a dot release to go hand in hand with the Player 10 release). However you can apply to take part in the FMS prerelease program and test these features before they are publicly released.

The next version of FMS and Player 10 will introduce a new protocol, RTMFP, which stands for Real Time Messaging Flow Protocol. This is a low latency, UDP based protocol that is based on Amicima's MFP protocol. Amicima was aquired by Adobe in 2006.

It sounds likely that FMS will act like a switchboard to connect various Flash clients into an optional peer to peer mode, offering high quality, low latency audio and video communications, and thereby sidestepping any bandwidth flowing through the server itself. Did I mention higher quality and lower latency? Think Skype inside a Flash application. Oh yes, I'll take two of those please.

In addition to the new protocol there's a new audio codec, Speex, to go with it. And what a great choice this codec is since Speex is open-source, as well as patent and royalty-free. It will be a revelation compared to Nellymoser, the only audio encoder that's currently present in the Flash Player.

There are tons of other exciting new features in Player 10 (enhanced text support - yeah), you can check a list here.

Oh and btw, Player 10, codenamed Astro, is really making some noise with its new sound features.

Rock on.

Interesting. Apart from the cool 360 degree video demo I blogged about earlier today, there also seem to be new features on the horizon for Flash Player and FMS when it comes to support for multiple bitrates and seamless switching between them depending on network conditions.

Kevin Towes presented on FMS at NAB recently and towards the end of his talk showed some sneak peaks of possibly upcoming new features in Flash and FMS. The experience he demoed shows an absolutely seamless switching capability between video feeds, or between multiple bitrates inside one file. It is not clear if it is the former or the latter, but in any case it sounds like that this is coming and it will make moving between bitrates of a single clip much easier and smoother. So smooth that you can't even hear a break in the audio.

Unfortunately the direct link to Kevin's talk does not seem to work, but if you go to http://tv.adobe.com and search for 'Kevin Towes' you will find the clip. It's the first result that comes up in the search and the sneak peak is towards the end of the presentation.

I'm not sure about it - but they say they did. In their recent FMS3 white paper on page 8 there's a reference to "the Adobe patented, RTMP over Transmission Control Protocol". I'm not sure if this was common knowledge but as far as I remember there was no known patent in existence around RTMP - but it certainly looks like there is now. A quick Google patent search brough up this result.
While RTMP has not been patented explicitly in this patent, something that sounds even wider reaching has (at least to my limited experience), namely a "Method and system for facilitating communications between an interactive multimedia client and an interactive multimedia communication server".

While I don't know if this particular patent is the one cited in the white paper but it was the only one I could find that appears applicable. It is US patent number 7246356, filed on Jan 29, 2003 (that's not too long after FCS was released and way before FMS2) and issued on Jul 17, 2007.
The inventors list is a who's who of Flash and FMS and includes Slavik Lozben, Pritham Shetty, Jonathan Gay, Stephen Cheng and Bradley Edelman.

I'm not sure what implications (if any) this patent may have for the likes of Red5, Wowza and other RTMP servers but it certainly appears that Adobe wants to protect their intellectual property at least on paper and 'just in case'.

Tinic Uro has posted a lot of information on the new file extensions that will be used by Flash video, given the fact that H.264 encoded content will become more and more popular and important over the coming months.
The primary reason for the move away from .flv for H.264 encoded content appears to be compatibility: Adobe want to ensure that a file with a a certain extension is compatible with Flash. The primary extension for H.264 compatible video in Flash will be .f4v. Other file formats include .f4p for protected media, .f4a for audio files and .f4b for audio books. You may still use .flv for these files (the Flash Player will not look at the extension anyway) but I guess this is discouraged. If you run your own web server then I recommend you add the necessary MIME types now (they are listed on Tinic's site) or ask your hosting provider to do this. I remember many issues a few years back when .flv became popular as web servers did not know how to serve that format in a way that browsers could understand.

More information can be found on Tinic's blog.

As you must have heard by now, Adobe have announced the upcoming support for H.264 video in the Flash Player. I guess On2 kind of gave the game away when they shifted their focus somewhat into the direction of H.264, yet my jaw is still firmly on the floor - I didn't think this would come around so quickly.
The bottom line: a huge step forward for web video. The Flash Player will incorporate what is arguably the most versatile and most widely adopted video codec around (it's used for much more than just web video), and it's an open standard at that with a huge eco system of encoders and tools to boot. Let it sink in and expect some big waves from this. You will be able to test this out via progressive download (I know I will) once Flash Player Beta Update 3 hits the streets later today on labs. Both Flash Media Server and Flash Media Encoder will support the codec in upcoming versions.
Tinic Uro has the most comprehensive set of information on his blog. Go check it out.

More coverage here.