Big day today. On one hand it's the second leg of the UEFA Champion's League semi final between Chelsea and Liverpool. On the other hand it's the first time I wanted to make a purchase for DRM protected streaming video. Here's how it went (and I can tell you know that I'm NOT watching the game...).

The background to this: I am a Sky subscriber, so I receive some TV channels via satellite. However I do not pay for the Sports package since I am generally not interested in that. Tonight's match however is only available on Sky Sports.

I'm not sure if you have ever paid to watch a video on the internet and even if you have I'd take a guess and predict that it was a rare occasion. It may therefore come to no surprise to you that demand for such a service seems to be quite limited. I personally wouldn't really know what site to turn to if I wanted to watch a full length movie that's just been released on DVD - sure such services may exist but they are definitely keeping a low profile.
I've heard that iTunes sells TV episodes (yet I can watch tons of stuff free on iPlayer so this seems pointless and it's usually more expensive than the boxed version!) but do they shift many units? I doubt it somehow. Who really wants a TV experience on their computer? I don't, I prefer the TV experience on my TV. What I could imagine myself doing is purchasing HD content for my Apple TV (which I love) once Apple finally gets their act together and provides the facility for me to hand over my hard earned cash.

It should also come to no surprise then that Brightcove just announced their discontinuation (which in normal English means they will no longer offer) of their Pay Media Functionality. In case you didn't know, Pay Media allowed 'publishers to sell or rent Windows media video titles directly to consumers via a Brightcove player'. According to Brightcove nobody really made use of the feature, and less than 1% of Brighcove customers are affected by the axing of the service. So out of all Brightcove publishers, less than one percent thought they could get punters to pay for a DRM'ed video. No tears shed here then.

And whatever happened to Joost, is anyone still watching that? Apparently it allows me to watch what I want, when I want. Hmmm, somehow that never worked for me and I could find nothing on Joost that I wanted to see...

So what's the deal here then? Do consumers really want to pay and consume video content over the internet? Or do they only like to consume, but not pay? Or maybe, are the offerings which would make consumers open their wallets simply not existent today?

In my opinion it's devices such as the Apple TV that lead the way. Choose, click, pay (now in the US and soon elsewhere), right from the comfort of your sofa, then watch on a nice big screen. I don't want to sitting front of my computer to watch a movie, even if it was free and HD. What matters to the crowd is convenience. The iPlayer experience in the living room would be a winner, hooked up to an easy way to pay. All that's left is for someone to build it.

According to this article, there won't be any support for Flash on the iPhone anytime soon. What sounds very much like a copout, Steve Jobs claimed that the full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" and that Flash Lite "is not capable of being used with the Web".
What he's trying to tell us is that the iPhone is underpowered to display most of today's web pages.

I personally don't really care much about this. The iPhone is still an outsider in terms of handset penetration. What would worry me more if I was in Adobe's shoes is Nokia's Silverlight initiative.

Did I mention how live Flash video would be big in 2008? Oh yes, I did. We've probably all come across the usual suspects by now and a lot of them are powered by FMS. And even if they're not (in the case of Justin.tv the guys rolled their own Python based RTMP server), it's still the same technology under the hood: RTMP servers which stream to a Flash UI.
Now apparently YouTube wants a slice of that cake and, as Sarah Meyers found out, they'll do it sometime this year. It remains to be seen if Google will put in an order for a couple of FMS license or if they will put their own spin on things, similar to what they did with their current HTTP pseudo streaming solution (check this post if you'd like to know more about that). But long story short, it's almost a given that the actual video will be Flash, regardless of how it gets to the server. At least I have my doubts that Google would use Silverlight :-) Of no, I don;t think Silverlight will support webcam originated video feeds... Bummer.
Well in that case, rock on Flash.

Sometime last year Fabio asked this question on his blog:
"Every day on the web new video related sites appear. Video sharing, video delivery sites or simply mashups, all Flash Video based. I'm very happy about this but there is a thing I can't understand and it is : why very often is video.smoothing property not used ? This is completely obscure to me because in my opinion a smoothed video is always better than a blocky one."

Of course he's right, video.smoothing is simple yet effective, once turned on your video will look a lot better. Take the following example. On the top you see the intro screen of a movie trailer with smoothing turned on, and on the bottom the same screen without smoothing (it looks bad because this video was scaled down quite heavily). Big difference, the top one looks a lot better.
Unfortunately smoothing (a property of the Video object in Flash/Flex) is turned off by default. To turn it on you simply set smoothing to true. Something like

But what i you're using the FLVPlayback component? How does one access the underlying video object there? It's quite simple really if you know where to look. The FLVPlayback component uses the VideoPlayer object under the hood, and VideoPlayer extends Video and therefore inherits the smoothing property.
Say you have a FLA file (AS3) with an instance of the FLVPlayback component on stage and named it flvpb. You simply need to add the following code to enable smooting: Note that you have to specify an index when calling getVideoPlayer(), but if you are not dealing woith indexes then it should normally be 0 anyway.
Hope this helps, go use it and tell your friends how smooth you are.

The Wowza team today announced a preview release of Wowza Media Server Pro which adds support for H.264/AAC playback as well as AMF3.
Looks like this space is hotting up and it didn't take the Wowza guys long to implement this feature. While there is no support for live H.264 streaming just yet it marks a significant step for Wowza. Whether or not we will ever see RTMPE implemented by servers other than FMS3 remains to be seen.

For three days that is - I haven't sold out just yet :-) From January 30th to February 1st I will be helping out at the Adobe booth at the Broadcast Live & Video Forum at Earls Court in London. We'll be giving demos on FMS3 and AMP as well as some fully fledged presentations. If you're in the area then why not pop by and say hi - I'm the guy in the Adobe shirt. Entry to this techy show is a reasonable GBP 15 and if you register in advance it's completely free.

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.

At MAX Europe in Barcelona I attended a session on Flash video in which Jens Loeffler of Adobe outlined the upcoming DRM features in Flash video. This was the first time I heard any technical details on how this DRM approach will work and what it can do. What follows is my approach at summarising what I gathered and a series of photos of all the DRM related slides that were shown.

As announced previously, Adobe is planning to offer two forms of digital rights management which they call content integrity (slide) and identity-based licensing (slide). In a nutshell the former means that a particular piece of content is only playable if it has not been altered, which is important if you as a content owner want to ensure for example that a pre-roll video ad is always part of the main content.

We all know that Adobe is pushing put new products and services at an insane rate these days. Apart from announcing Share at MAX in Chicago there were two other products which caught my attention and which are very exciting and a bit scary at the same time: Pacifica and CoCoMo.
Let me summarize what I know so far about these two products/services and then tell you why I think some of it is a little scary.

It's not too much to ask for is it? If Real really wants to be in the headlines then they've just succeeded as I've decided to blog about this topic until this type of interference is eradicated. Maybe Real's engineers are simply bad programmers or maybe their marketing team decided that breaking existing content is ok as long as video can be ripped successfully. But Flash developers do not find this funny and I'm unsure as to how much good it will do to restore a Real-ly bad reputation of an intrusive and annoying piece of software.
In the meantime, this page on OSFlash is a good place to aggregate all Real Player issues.
Don't sit still until Real Player starts breaking your own content, blog about it, make a fuss. Once this Player gets pushed out on a bigger scale the problem could get a lot worse.

I put a question mark on that headline because right now this is more of a rumour than hard fact. However according to this article on streamingmedia.com, Mark Randall, chief strategist in the Dynamic Media organization at Adobe Systems, has allegedly stated that 'VP7 was announced during the production phase of the newest version of Flash CS3, so its day will have to wait until the next version of the content creation software.'
This could mean that Flash Player 10 will contain another high performance video codec. VP7 is being compared to H.264 in terms of quality, but achieves the quality at a lower bitrate. The article also states that 'the current Flash Player 9 is, however, capable of playing back VP7 content created in other software tools and saved with the FLV extension.' This is not something I have tested yet - maybe someone else can confirm?

Note upfront: you need the latest Flash Player 9 Beta to watch these videos. This also means you have to uninstall your current Flash Player. I've had a few issues on my Vista machine (more trouble than it's worth) but it worked nicely on my MacBook Pro. That being said it runs on Vista now too, but not very well. I do have lots of problems with iTunes and QT on this machine and encountered another Stop error while writing this post... argh.

Watch the samples here.

The samples use 4 different videos. The movie trailers are all from Apple.com while the Backcountry clip is from Adobe. The trailers all use H.264 video in 720p resolution (1280x720), however the Shrek trailer is quite dark. Make sure you hit the full screen button. My 2.21Ghz Vista machine really seems to struggle, but it struggles with .MOV also. Also note that I haven't implemented any of the performance tips which Adobe recommend. Be patient, each video is between 50MB and 100MB in size. It's using a 10 second buffer - not recommended for dial-up :-) If things seem slow now then please try again later.

A heads up: the FLVPlayback component will currently not accept files with a .mp4 extension. I had a hard time getting it to work and had already rolled another player when I tried simply appending .flv to it. That did the trick and my mp4 files now use a naming convention of Rendition.mov.flv, even though it complained that the file can't be opened. trust me it can once you run it in a browser. I am sure this will be fixed in a future update for FLVPlayback.
The Flash Player simply ignores the file extension (once the file is loaded) and figures out the contents by itself by looking into the file. So even though it says .flv on the outside it's got H.264 inside. Note also that watching of videos does not seem to work inside the Flash IDE, presumably it is using an older Player there.

Lastly I am making my FLA file available for download. You need Flash CS3 to open it.

Have fun. If my site goes down later today you'll know why :-) Donations in form of a CDN account for downloadable content are most welcome.

There's some more great info on H.264 here.

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.

The most popular post by far on my site is the one covering pseudo video streams via PHP. In a nutshell, this method allows you to provide a streaming-like experience to your users without having to deploy a streaming server. This offers the benefits of a low cost architecture using only a webserver which runs PHP or one of the ports that users have posted in the comments, including .NET, ColdFusion and others.

Lorenzo Benjamin of xmoov.com has taken the PHP approach to the next level and added a bunch of nice features to it. He's also providing a productized offering around it which add some real value to anyone who's looking for a turn key solution. He's also followed my example and open sourced his PHP code. Nice job Lorenzo. I've seen other 'companies' take the code I posted and use it for commerical purposes without as much as an attribution, let alone posting their modified sources.
It's therefore even better to see all the efforts that people are putting into this concept, posting their findings, sharing their code and writing about their experiences. It also shows a clear need for a low cost streaming video platform for Flash video.

I'm following Keith's advise to post this alert. In case you haven't heard aboutthe issue yet, the latest Real Player Beta (and I believe all the previously released Real Player 11 Betas) can seriously affect the functionality of some SWF content that's deployed on the web. The worst bug appears to be an interference with parameters that a SWF movie may pass when connecting to Flash Media Server, which in effect breaks that movie's functionality.

To simplify, certain deployed applications will work fine before a user installs Real Player 11 Beta and cease to work once Real Player 11 Beta is installed.
This would not be such a major problem if the Real Player Beta was offered to a selected audience for thorough testing - in which bugs can be expected. Which is what you would expect from a Beta program. But this player is available directly from Real's homepage and it is the most prominent download link for the Real Player full stop. This in turn means that many users install the player without being fully aware that they are essentially downloading a possibly (and in this case a definite) bug ridden version.

One can only speculate what Real Player is doing to the content it intercepts but as outlined by Matt Spragins, Director of Product at RealPlayer, it 'loads its own SWF before other SWFs are loaded in order to determine where videos are located on a web page'.

Backgrounder: the latest Real Player allows users to download content which was otherwise destined for web only viewing, a feature which has been met with mixed reviews and claims of possible copyright infringement.

On july 25th Real announced that it was aware of the issue and is fixing this bug but as of today (August 1st) no update has been released and the affected version is still available from the Real.com homepage.
But hey, at least it gets people talking about Real Player.

We all know that Flash video is everywhere these days but what surprises me is how little quality control appears to be applied to the footage that big brands push out these days. And I'm not talking about the content but the video itself. The production effort going into these clips is usually very high but what about encoding? Why do I see video which is not deinterlaced time and time again when it's so easy to fix? Aren't the companies behind this footage supposed to be professionals?

How do you spot intelaced video? Easy: "After compression there are lines in my movie".
Interlacing occurs when footage that is shot to be displayed on TV is put on the web without much thought going into the delivery medium. Tradional analogue TV systems such as PAL, Secam and NTSC display an interlaced picture which is made up of individual lines that are added to the screen in odd and even numbers. Without deinterlacing techniques, such an image can show very obvious signs of linear artifacts, especially in high motion sequences.

Examples:
Ikea Business. Nice big Flash video pieces but wait until somebody moves... It looks like this.

Will it Blend. Brilliant site, shame about the stripes (and the iPhone).

I know this article makes me sound like a know-it-all but interlacing artifacts are so easy to spot and mega easy to rectify. Most encoders require you to tick one box and that's it, job done.

Sorenson Squeeze: I think this tool's deinterlacing option is under the Filter Settings.

On2 Flix: Load a video into the tool, then under the file tab click Video Editor, then check the deinterlace checkbox.

Adobe Flash CS3 Video Encoder: Load a file, go to the Video tab, check the deinterlace checkbox (I believe this option is new to CS3).

In my opinion the deinterlace option should be a default. amateurs can be excused for not knowing this and quite honestly it's not a big problem for home movies. But Ikea? And pure video sites such as Will it Blend? Heck even the New York Times sported interlaced video for a while.

So next time your video looks stripy remember to deinterlace.

I've just made a worrying discovery: it seems that in some instances my preferred method of embedding a SWF file into a web page (I normally use SWFObject) can fail in quite a bad way for some users running IE7 on Windows - that's a lot of potential users that cannot see your SWF content.
I tend to test less and less on IE these days and instead concentrate on Firefox and while that's not such good practice it's usually no problem because of the fact that SWF run consistently across platforms and browsers. However in the last few days I have had several clients email me and reporting that some pages prompt them to upgrade their Flash Player despite them running Player 9 already. Even after installing the latest Player the problem persists. All users were running IE7 on Windows. The problem is described in more detail here.
It affected my machine too and I was unable to even run the SWFObject sample page in IE7 - it worked fine in Firefox. The page would simply display a message stating that I needed to upgrade my Flash Player. This really worried me as I was under the impression that SWFObject was a 100% reliable way to display SWFs, all the way through the Expressinstall process in case users do run an older version of the Player.

The way I managed to fix the issue (I don't know what or how it was caused) was to download this Flash Player installer and run it. After installation, the same page worked fine in IE7... And apparently the 'old' (but EOLAS prone) way of embedding SWFs also works which could mean that SWFObject is in some way less reliable than the old fashioned way of embed.

Of course I cannot ask users to download and run an executable just in case they have this Flash Player problem. I'm stumped now - should I ditch SWFObject? Is there a reliable workaround?

Please could you check this page in IE7 on Windows and report what you see by posting a comment. Thanks.

Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion and not a confirmed detail by Apple or Adobe but I believe that the iPhone WILL run Flash and Flash Video. The reason for my assumption is a TV ad for the iPhone which I just watched at apple.com.

The ad is called 'Watered down' and makes a point of the fact that the iPhone does not show a watered down version of the internet but the internet as it is with most of its features. It seems that in my book and in that of Apple this includes Flash - if the ad is showing an actual iPhone running the actual New york Times site, which includes Flash Video! Check this image which I grabbed from the ad.
The circled area holds a SWF including Flash Video and apparently it's rendering fine.








Compare that with this image from the Keynote by Steve Jobs which also showed the NY Times site but without the Flash piece...

I think this observation is extremely promising. Apple cannot seriously call its internet device NOT watered down without Flash support - or maybe they can?. And if it does support Flash then we all know what this means, for example live video and audio, amongst an arsenal of other features. Who knows, we'll know one way or the other soon.
Oh and by the way anyone claiming they don't want an iPhone is lying. And I don't want one either.

...and this is not an Apple TV hack I'm talking about but an announcement by Google and Apple regarding a partnership which will bring YouTube content to the Apple TV (I've got one and it rocks, this will make it even better).
Note though that I did not say 'Flash video' on the Apple TV, nope. All YouTube content is first being transcoded using H.264 in order to make it playable on Apple TV. Which brings me to my main point: Please Adobe, could you add H.264 support to the Flash Player? Not to make it play on Apple TV without conversion but to bring the Flash Player codec offerings up to date. And while you're at it could you throw in some new audio codecs too? :-)

Are you a Mac user with an Intel Core Duo machine? Do you run BootCamp? If the answer is yes then could you do me a favour and tell me if Flash Media Encoder (FME) will run on your machine under Windows via BootCamp? We've already found out that FME is not compatible (or does not seem to be able to access cameras) under Windows via Parallels.

I've recently bought a second-hand MacBook Pro and have already tried FME under Parallels. As expected the application runs but throws an error when trying to access a camera which is otherwise working fine in Windows. I'd give BootCamp a try myself but on this particular machine it will require a reinstall of OSX which I cannot carry out right now as I'll have to wait until Kevin sends me the OSX disks ;-)
So in the meantime I would appreciate it if someone else could tell me if they can get FME to run (and access a camera) on a Mac running Windows via BootCamp.
The reason for why I'm in a bit of a hurry with this is that there's a chance I may be running some live broadcasts from the Adobe Live event in London on June 5th/6th (I'll be there on June 5th so say hello if you spot me struggeling with getting a decent WIFI signal). Thanks boys and girls, please post a comment below or email me via the contact link at the top of the page.

A friend just sent me this link and wow, what a great idea: The Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT's Media Lab has developed a programming tool called Scratch which makes programming as easy as playing with building blocks. Mainly aimed at kids, users can drag and drop visual blocks of functionality and snap them together to blend images, sound and video.
The BBC has a great article on Scratch and - would you believe it - they are using Flash video to make their point. It appears that the BBC is trialing embedded (Flash) video and they want to gather feedback from users. Make sure you leave yours on this page and encourage them to continue.
Great stuff. I'll make sure to force Scratch onto my daughter once she can read ;-)

Learn more about Scratch and download it.

What did I tell you - 2007 is the year of Live Flash streaming. And for those of you who need to broadcast to a large live audience you can - from July - run your live flash video operations via the Akamai CDN. Full press release here.
I'll report back once I get a chance to play with the new service.

Very briefly: a quick heads up on an error that many users encounter when studying the admin logs files of Flash Media Server. It looks somewhat like this:
(e)2581279 Assert failed in \server\admin\FCSAdminServer.cpp line 358
This is nothing to worry about, as one of the FMS engineers explained: "[...] the bandwidth measurement used for license checking there cannot go negative. Unfortunately I missed a case where it can, and then will stay negative. Fortunately, we don't check license bandwidth that way anyway, did it another way. All that's left is the annoying assert, sorry."

So now it's on record: this failed Assert can be ignored.

At least that's what Heise.de, a german tech portal, reported yesterday. The announcent has also been spread via Yahoo News.
Make up your own mind but I find this borders on embarrassment. I'm not sure if Adobe saw this coming and got its Flex announcement out earlier (I suspect not though) or if Microsoft is playing catch up once again but in any case this is certainly starting to turn into a right armwrestling match now...

Oh dear I have to try hard to stop myself from a huge rant here - and I most likely won't succeed. My personal feeling about Silverlight, in a nutshell, is that yes, it does pose a thread to Adobe and will undoubtedly eat into the Flash Platform's market share (and I say Flash Platform because it's no longer just Flash, it's Flex, it's Apollo, it's Flash Media Server plus a few things we undoubtedly don't yet know about).
I read Ted's blog regularly and I felt that his MS bashing was over the top - yet he does make some valid points. But then on the other hand I also come across blogs like that of Kurt Shintaku, a Microsoft employee who tells us a similar story but from an MS perspective and notes the 'Top 10 reasons why MS Silverlight can succeed' (notice the use of the word can, not will...). What winds me up about this post is the huge amount of misinformation Kurt spreads about Flash (and he doesn't even mention Flex - very convenient) while proclaiming under point 1 that 'It's not about "copying Flash".

Adobe has set up a group of hand picked partners to help clients deliver live video broadcasts via Flash Media Server. The list currently includes The FeedRoom, Jalipo, Multicast Media, Onstream Media and stimTV.
the program is quite squarely aimed at live events and webcasts which further underlines my point about the increasing growth if live Flash video applications that we're about to witness.
Read all about the Flash Media Solution Provider Program here.

Here's my first tip for working with Flex 2 and Flash CS3. I'm not sure if you have had the opportunity yet to test drive Flash CS3 but if you have and you've also used Flex Builder on a regular basis then F;ash's ActionScript Editor will suddenly appear like a second class citizen to you. Don't get me wrong, Flash is still entirely suited to write ActionScript and CS3 has some cool improvements in this area but I personally feel spoilt by Flex Builder and want to use it as an AS Editor for my Flash projects too.
I started working on a Flash (AS3) project last week which makes use of the new AS3 based FLVPlayback component.

We all saw it coming and here it is. Adobe is to offer a DRM solution for Flash Video via its own Adobe Media Player, previously code named Philo. The Player was announced at NAB and it will achieve 2 major goals: consumers will be able to play FLV content right on their desktop (Adobe Media Player is an Apollo app under the hood and will run on Win and Mac, with Linux support to follow) and content owners will have the ability to restrict the content within it, either by simply making sure that ads show up where they should or by tieing the content to authorized computers. Click here for a screenshot.
I will spare you my thoughts on DRM (if you're a regular reader of this publication you will know my take on that) but I am nevertheless very excited about the Player itself - after all the DRM portion is optional. It appears to be much more than just another video Player, in fact it reminds me a little bit of an iTunes for video or an internet TV application. Some of the stuff you'll be able to do with this baby include:
- double click an FLV file to play it inside the Media Player, including HD footage, and do so cross platform
- stream, download and manage FLV content, watch it offline
- create Playlists
- automatically download your favourite shows
- protect FLV content both in downloadable and streaming format
- track your content

Wow, this is a lot to take in and the feature list here isn't even complete. This baby sounds a bit like the swiss army knife for online video, adding a ton of features for both content owners and consumers.
It should be noted however that the press release does not state if and how FLV content that's delivered traditionally (a la YouTube) can be protected - I presume it can't be. It may be the case that Adobe Media Player is required which in turn leads me to ask the question: how customizable will the experience be by developers? Custom branding is of course one of the main advantages of Flash video in-browser, besides the ubiquity of the format.
Adobe Media Player will be available as a free beta download in mid-2007.
Now let me digest this for a minute...

I've never used either OS but if you'd like to run Flash Player 9 (beta) on Solaris Sparc or Solaris x86 then now you can. Get the update on Labs.