Woops, looks I got a few facts wrong when I earlier blogged that FMS 3.5 had been released. It appears that while the new release is available to order from the Adobe shop it does not yet ship. The downloads of the trial versions are also still FMS 3. Sorry about this, I'll update the blog once the product actually ships.

Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 (FMS 3.5) is now available to pre-order. It will incorporate new features including Dynamic Streaming, DVR functionality, HTTP delivery support, and H.264 enhancements.
The upgrade price in the US is the US$349 (depending on your existing edition), with UK pricing being in line with that (and by that I mean: just change your currency symbol since the UK price puts the exchange rate to the US dollar more or less at 1:1 with a price of GBP 346.62).
You can download the current version (FMS3) from the Adobe website and give it a try.

Apologies for the earlier misinformation, I was under the impression that FMS 3.5 had actually shipped.

A page and FAQ on Adobe Stratus is now up on Labs.

As you may have heard, Stratus is the name of an upcoming service that will allow Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5 clients to connect directly to one another in a peer to peer mode and exchange data once a connection is established. The protocol used is the new RTMFP (real time media flow protocol) protocol and it runs over UDP, not TCP. The use of UDP has a positive effect on latency and will therefore make Flash Player's peer to peer features ideal for one to one communications and reduce bandwidth costs since the server is sidestepped. You can try the new features using this sample application (Player 10 required).

While the Stratus cloud service is necessary to connect clients in this way, there will also be an upcoming version of Flash Media Server that is capable of facilitating this connection. More information on this is available in this PDF file.

RTMFP is one of the most exiting developments for Flash Player in recent times and it will add major new capabilities to the platform. There are plans to develop RTMFP further, and I recommend you attend the Sneak Peak sessions at Adobe MAX Milan next week where Adobe may showcase application level multi-cast over RTMFP. As outlined by Matthew Kaufman at MAX North America, the RTMFP protocol could evolve further and support one to many broadcasts, Group setups as well as Direct Routing.
Flash Player 10 will not enable swarming, multi-cast or broadcast quality live video at this time.

These are definitely exciting times to be a Flash Platform developer.

Wow, it even appears to convert some users from Windows to Linux if you believe the comments in this article.
You can grab the 64bit Flash Player 10 for Linux on labs.

It's official: HD on the web is broken. And guess what: it doesn't matter which technology (Flash/Silverlight) you use, neither seems to deliver on its promises.

Take this post with a pinch of salt because it's only my own perspective, but I would say I'm in a fairly good position to report on the playback experiences I have had. My setup is slightly above average with a new 24" iMac, 4GB of RAM and a fast connection. Right now it measured 4.5Mbit/s which I consider fast enough for any HD content, especially if it uses smooth streaming, adaptive streaming, multi-bitrate streaming or whatever else the latest buzzword is.

I mean seriously, what is it that makes Adobe so attractive to Microsoft employees? Are they looking for blogs like this one to write a reply and feed off some link bait? That's clearly a successful strategy, especially when the same bloggers selectively turn off comments on such posts. How lame.
Why not tell us about your technology, show us how it's better, faster, prettier, and maybe convert one or two of us?

I am really getting bored of it. Whenever I attend a non-Adobe conference and watch any Microsoft folks speak I hear how bad [insert Adobe technology here] is in comparison to [insert Microsoft technology here]. Is this really necessary? Can Silverlight not stand up by itself, or does it really require a bashing of the other guy? I simply don't see this behaviour in the Flash camp, they are quite happy to show their work and let that speak for itself. Good on you.

PS: Check out the tag cloud - says a lot about Microsoft's focus. Borderline obsessive.

Definitely off topic, but I can't help myself. This morning I quickly created some new ringtones for my (i)phone. If you like Fonejacker you will like those. Otherwise you can fall back on the two CTU ringtones which I've thrown into the zip as well. Otherwise go and check out Fonejacker, he may grow on you. But remember: he likes his tomatoes, and he likes 'em FRESH!

To add these to your iPhone simply unzip and drag the .m4r files into iTunes. They should work with any standard iPhone. If you want to create your own iPhone ringdings you can do so easily using Garageband. Ok, back to work I go...

There's quite a lot happening on Twitter today (you can follow me if you like) and I thought I may post a few important announcements here.

AIR and Flash Player 10 on mobile is a big deal. The Google Android creator Andy Rubin was on stage talking about Flash Player 10 running on Android. There was also a demo of installing Flash Lite apps over the air on Windows Mobile and Symbian. About time.
More importantly, Adobe and ARM are partnering up and will bring the full Player 10 to a lot of smartphones. Adobe can also deliver Player 10 for the Jesus Phone - but Steve Jobs needs to give it the ok first. Apple's loss (and mine) if you ask me.

Thermo is now called Flash Catalyst. Nice piece of toolkit, rubbish name.

A 64bit preview release of Flash Player 10 for Linux is available now on Labs.

Cocomo is in public beta, but I told you that already.

Last but not least, Major League Baseball (MLB.com) are switching back to Flash for all their video broadcasts, dropping Silverlight in the process. That's quite a big deal since MLB have made a serious investment in Windows Media. Since their service is pay per view one must assume that they are quite happy with the level of protection Flash video offers them.

Just a quick note in case you've missed it, Cocomo is now up on Adobe Labs. Give it a spin.

Today Adobe announced the next version of Flash Media Server, FMS 3.5. Dynamic Streaming makes it easier to deliver a consistent stream even when bandwidth conditions and general network health changes during playback. While similar techniques were possible before it is now even easier and in particular much more seamless to integrate this functionality.
The DVR feature is great when viewing live streams, either to rewind back to the beginning of the broadcast or simply to re-view a certain part of the stream. I can see this being a great feature for sports broadcasts in particular.

FMS 3.5 now also ships with an in-built web server in the form of Apache. This allows developers to provide a single point of access to their content and they can now deliver SWF, JPEG, CSS, JS and other assets including video over it. It's notable that both RTMPT and HTTP can co-exist on the same port (80) and IP address.

Kevin Towes has a full length post on his blog outlining all the new features in FMS 3.5.

Adobe today announced the Cocomo public beta, a technology which allows developers to add real-time social capabilities into their web applications.
Cocomo basically leverages the Adobe Connect back-end to deliver features such as Data Messaging (think traditional Remote SharedObjects), VoIP Audio, Webcam Video, File Sharing, Text Chat and so on. The tool is provided in shape of a developer framework and component set that can be used to build Flex based applications.

Cocomo is definitely a very cool platform and on the surface it makes it easy to build real-time applications that may otherwise be quite difficult to build. But I also see an enormous overlap between Cocomo and Flash Media Server.

Google have announced a new feature for Gmail (Google Talk to be exact): free voice and video chat.
The plu-gin (which according to PC World) is a proprietary, non-Flash based system and supports Chrome, Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Safari 3.0. The technology apparently comes from a company called Marratech which Google acquired last year.

While the encoding is obviously handled by a proprietary plug-in, it was reported that the client to view the video is in fact Flash. This is interesting, since it would suggest RTMP being used as the protocol. The Google blog however mentions only XMPP, RTP and H.264 as the technologies used... Hmm interesting. I'm sure some folks will dig deeper and report back with their findings. I have installed the plug-in but got nobody to call since I never use Google Talk. Help, I need friends.

Footnote: US folks can order some very good webcams with fairly big discounts.

Should you have any doubts about the importance of Flash Media Server in Adobe's overall strategy then look no further than Adobe MAX San Francisco.
As just announced by Kevin Towes, FMS Product Manager, Flash Media Server will have big presence at this year's MAX and feature not only in the keynote but also in a dedicated Bird of a Feather session about the 'Future of Video on the Web'. I would not want to miss that one... (however I will since I'm not going to be in San Francisco for MAX)

There are a lot video and FMS related sessions happening and you should check out the particulars which Kevin is highlighting, including Multibitrate Video, Future of Communication with RTMFP and the Sneak Peak session at 5.30pm on Tuesday November 18th.

I will not make it to the US but will be attending MAX Europe in Milan in a few weeks time, where I will also be speaking on Building Collaborative Applications with FMS, a re-run of my session at Flash on the Beach. I say re-run - but it may only be a partial one - because if all goes well I will get the green light to show some of the new RTMFP/P2P features which are coming to a browser near you soon.

I will see you in Milan.

I've recently decided that I should post more tips and tricks on this blog. I get a lot of emails and also answer questions on mailing lists that contain information that may be hard to track down (or in the case of email replies impossible) and would be better posted publicly on a blog. Here's one I'd like to start with.

Question: I have been trying to use your tutorial on the NetStream.send function and am getting frustrated. I have been researching this for the past couple of days and not finding any answers.