Michael Hurwicz has published an excellent tutorial over at streamingmedia.com covering the creation of transcripts for use in Flash video.
In it Michael explains how you can use Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, Adobe Media Encoder, and Flash to to automatically generate a text transcript based on speech in a video, and then use that transcript as a captioning file within Flash.

One thing I'd like to point out (without actually having gone through the process myself) is that it may be preferable to keep the produced XML timed caption file separate from the video rather than embedding the cue points into the video, if that's what's happening. This would leave you more flexible if you had to, for example, provide multiple language tracks for one piece of video content, and even opens the door for switching the language of the transcriptions at runtime.

Check out Michael's article here.

I recently had a requirement for Scribblar (more on that site in another post) to verify if a domain name or page URL entered by a user is valid. Luckily ActionScript 3 features support for Regular Expressions, however my RegExp skills are non existent. So I reached out via Twitter to see if anyone could help. It took all of 10 minutes and a quick session on pastebin for Robert 'Da Man' Hall to sort the problem out for me. In order to preserve this nugget of knowledge for future generations, here it is.

Usage

Thanks Robert!

'I get no spam' - a quote by John C. Dvorak. He is referring to an email filtering system which offers a highly effective approach to spam detection, offered by Computer Tyme, a small service provider with a website at junkemailfilter.com.

As you can imagine I get many many emails since I not only run this blog but several other sites and domains. A couple of years ago the amount of spam I was receiving got severely out of hand. I was finding myself spending incrasing amounts of time on wading through spam and I was losing time and money. Something had to be done. After trying a lot of approaches including server side blacklists via SpamAssassin as well as client side filtering I gave junkemailfilter.com a try. I haven't looked back since.

What I like about the service is the fact that spam never even touches my mail server, instead it is filtered beforehand. That means I no longer have to download tons of spam emails which get sorted into a junk email folder, which I in turn have to wade through anyway to check for false positives. Junkemailfilter.com acts as a kind of proxy mail server to any domains I add to it, meaning that mail for my sites is delivered to their mail servers where it is filtered and only the good mail is forwarded to me. To make it effective they deploy every anti spam trick in the book, starting with intentionally invalid MX records (spammers often only try the first MX record, then give up if that fails) to 'normal' filters such as SpamAssassin. In fact most spam is rejected right at connect time to the mail server, and overall Junkemailfilter.com has over 99% accuracy.

You can read more about how it works here.

So if you have a problem with spam then drop Marc Perkel at Computer Tyme a note. If you do, or if you are already using his service, then please leave a comment and tell us about your experiences. I'm glad to say that I am in the same camp as John C. Dvorak: I get no spam.

Can someone recommend a decent Powerpoint to JPG (or maybe SWF converter)? It does not need to have loads of features, I'd be quite happy with a simple one-JPG-per-slide conversion. I used to use Flashpaper, but that's now dead, plus I need something that works easily within a Flex app, so no AS2/AVM1 output please. It also needs to run server side on Windows.
Can you recommend a tool? I don't mind paying for it, nor do I mind if it strips Powerpoint gimmicks such as animations and sound (guess JPG would not support those anyway :-)

Please leave a comment if you have used such a tool and tell us your experience with it. Maybe we can come up with a definitive list here.

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.

This is not brand new news it may not have reached the mainstream. Adobe has big plans for its video production workflow and voice-to-text extraction could be a new milestone in their quest for world domination (ok, maybe I am exaggerating a bit).

Beet.TV have more info on this, and their comments are spot on: the implications of having extensive metadata about Flsh video content are massive, and it will catapult video search functionality into a new era.

*** UPDATE 10th Octover 2008 *** The bug has now been withdrawn from the SWFObject project since we are no longer convinced that SWFObject is the culprit here. In fact I'm having a hard time reproducing this problem now in anything but one application which uses the old Macromedia communication framework. With that particular app I can reproduce the problem regardless of browser and OS, whereas before the problem only surfaced for me on IE on Windows. I will post updated here as I find them. *** END UPDATE ***

I've just managed to iron out a nasty bug in one of my FMS apps and this issue will likely affect other applications.
One of my clients noticed that some users would show up multiple times in a userlist of one of my applications. The userlist was tied to a SharedObject and users were removed from this SharedObject as they logged off. I noticed that the issue only surfaces in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, regardless of the minor Flash Player version used.
Moreover (and this was the hard bit to figure out) the issue seemed to surface only on those pages which used SWFObject 2 or SWFObject 2.1 to embed the SWF. Any pages using a previous version of SWFObject (in particular I was using version 1.5) the problem did not occur.

My conclusion is therefore that the problem somehow lies with SWFObject and how it interacts with Internet Explorer. For some reason the onDisconnect event is not invoked on FMS (I was using FMS 2 in this particular app) when my SWF was embedded with SWFObject 2.0 or above and I have now rolled back to SWFObject 1.5. Hope this helps someone as it may easily have you pulling your hair out.

I've just run into a problem with my Flex Debugger - it basically stopped working. I tried reinstalling the Flash Debug Player and also tried restarting Flex Builder with the -clean option. All to no avail.
A Quick Google search however brought up this and this. It seems that several Firefox add-ons can break the Flex Debugger (this seems to be a bug with Firefox 3's handling of add-ons). For me personally, disabling the Google Toolbar add-on fixed the Flex Debugger. Other users reported that disabling Greasemonkey or Adblock provided a fix. I can live without the Google Toobar, but I cannot live without the Flex Debugger...

By the way, here's how to start Flex Builder with the -clean option, it can sometimes solve issues - though not in this case.
Run Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
Then enter:

I've been using ThunderBolt AS3 for all of my Flex and Flash projects for a while now an don't think I could live without it. It's great for debugging and also helps troubleshoot issues that only my clients seem to encounter :-)
For those who don't know, ThunderBolt AS3 is a Logger extension for Flash and Flex AS3 projects which uses Firebug and Firefox to show traces and debug information right inside the browser. Usefulness: 10/10.

ThunderBolt AS3 is now also available for AIR, and while I haven't used this latest version yet I have no doubt that it's equally as versatile as the 'old' Flash/Flex version. I highly recommend you give it a try if you are building AIR projects (or use the initial version for your Flash AS3 and Flex work).

ThunderBolt AS3 for Flash/Flex
ThunderBolt AS3 for AIR

Adobe have just released version 2.5 of the Flash Media Encoder, a free live video encoder which connects to Flash Media Server 3 or a compatible CDN to broadcast live Flash video streams in high quality.
Apart from H.264 support the software also supports the commercial AAC Audio Encoder Plug-in by MainConcept, rounding off the capability to deliver high quality live webcasts in Flash.

More details are available on the product page. I'm hoping to set up a sample stream sometime soon - I just need to wrap up half a dozen or so projects first ;-)

If you haven't heard of the JW FLV Media Player yet then you must have been offline for the last year or two. It is is without doubt the most widely used Flash Video player on the net and best of all it's open source and free to use for non commercial projects. A Creative Commons License starts at a mere 20 Euros.

Highlights of the most recent update include:
1. MP4 (H.264) mimetype detection in playlists.
2. Automatic MP4 / FLV selection based upon plugin version with the "fallback" flashvar.
3. Better scaling and positioning of the "recommendations" screen.
4. Lots of bugfixes, notably with the often-appearing "activity" icon and with the javascript API.

The JW FLV Media Player is built with Adobe's Flash is an easy and flexible way to add video and audio to your website. It supports playback of any format the Adobe Flash Player can handle (FLV, but also MP3, H264, SWF, JPG, PNG and GIF). It also supports RTMP and HTTP (Lighttpd) streaming, RSS, XSPF and ASX playlists, a wide range of flashvars (variables), an extensive javascript API and accessibility features.

Check out the JW FLV Media Player.

There's a long standing post on Tink's blog about the lack of support for OSX by Flash Media Encoder (FME). While I initially had little luck getting FME to recognize any connected camera in Parallels I have since noticed (in a proper DOH moment) that USB devices often need enabling separately under Parallels.
The quick and easy fix to get FME running under Parallels is therefore to simply click the little USB icon (see image) and choose the camera you wish to use (for example 'Built-in iSight). Once you've done that you can use your iSight or other chosen camera under Parallels with FME.

My main development machine is a Wintel iMac running Leopard and Windows XP, the latter of which is normally fired up in Parallels (rarely in Bootcamp).
The main downside of this setup in my opinion was the fact that the FMS applications directory resided on the XP virtual machine which meant that every time I had to make a change to a server side script I had to either edit it directly in XP or (as I prefer) make my changes in OSX but then had to copy the file over to the FMS applications directory in XP. So I thought to myself 'wouldn't it be nice if I could somehow map my OSX development directory to FMS and use that folder as the main applications directory for my FMS apps?'.

I knew that folders can be shared between OSX and XP (the former being the host OS and the latter the guest OS) but I had little hope it would actually work. Well guess what, it worked and it was really easy to set up.

Firstly (and I did this a while ago) I configured my XP virtual machine to use Bridge Networking, which means that the XP virtual machine is treated like a physical machine on my local network. I assigned it a static IP (in my 10.0.0 range) and started FMS. From then on I could connect to FMS via rtmp://10.0.0.9 from OSX.

Back in OSX and in Parallels I chose Edit > Virtual Machine > Shared Folders and added a user defined shared folder (in my case it was /Users/stefan/Documents/dev/fms) which holds all my FMS projects. I also ticked the Global sharing checkbox. I wanted this shared folder to act as my FMS applications folder and I gave it a share name of 'fms'.
Back in XP I fired up notepad and opened conf\_defaultRoot_\_defaultVHost_\Vhost.xml in my FMs install directory and configured my appsdir as follows:

To be honest I did not think that this would work at this stage... But after restarting FMS I was able to run FMS on XP inside Parallels with the applications directory mapped to the OSX partition and I'm now able to do all my FMS work from within OSX without having to touch XP (must be a good thing). I use the admin console to view traces and issue restarts as normal, also from OSX.
Of course the FMS virtual machine must be running while you want to use FMS it but that's kind of obvious. This setup works well for me and while I am still getting used to OSX (oh yes it has its moments...) I can at least feel at home as far as FMS goes.

Flash Media Encoder 2 (FME) has just been released. FME is a FREE live broadcasting tool and designed to enable you to capture live audio and video while streaming it in real-time to Flash Media Server (FMS).
It uses the high quality VP6 codec (and chances are that H.264 will be added to support the Flash Player's upcoming new codec) and also adds MP3 audio encoding, a much requested feature. On top of that, FME can also be tightly integrated into your streaming infrastructure with command-line control both locally and through a remote connection. Auto-restart after power failures or other system re-starts helps ensure that your live streams are reliably available.
You can download FME here.

As promised previously here are some instructions on how to create a stack trace for FMS on Linux. Thanks to Asa Whillock from Adobe for writing this up.

1. Go to your installed FMS directory
2. You should see in this directory something like core.#### where #### is the PID of the crashed process.
3. If you don't see core.#### after the crash, likely you have core dumps turned off so that Linux didn't make one when you crashed.
3a. Edit your 'server' file in the same FMS install dir. Add the line 'ulimit -c unlimited' following the other ulimits in the first few lines. Then run and crash again.
4. Write a new file - it's a batch file for gdb. I called mine stackTracer
5. In this new file insert only two lines


6. Save and close the file
7. Run the following command in the same dir


Now you should have a file named stackOutput that when you open it has a stack trace with all the threads and symbols that can be taken from fmscore when it crashed. If you get a file with mostly ?? for the right side of the stacks it might not be the right file so check what crashed - it might not have been the fmscore.

That's a good start point for narrowing down any problems with a crashing FMS.

Flash video allstar Robert Reinhardt has just posted a neat tool for calculating FLV bitrates for both video and audio.
The widget is built in Flash and can also save out a Squeeze Project file (SQZ file) which can then be used for compression. Robert will also be adding support for Flix projects soon. Lastly if you don't want to run the SWF version you can also download Win and Mac projectors. Nice one.

A few weeks ago someone posted about problems with their FMS server on the Flash Media List. Asa Whillock from Adobe was kind enough to post these guidelines for creating a core crash dump on Windows. The instructions for Linux will follow.

Every now and then the forums bring up some goodies and this is one of them, part of the longest ever running thread.

On our quest for a way to transcode Nellymoser Asao audio (the codec used by the Flash Player when encoding audio and recording it to Flash Media Server) someone posted a link to an apparently stable and fast decoder, posted on Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/nelly2pcm/downloads/list

It runs on Linux and you can find more information about it here. With it you can imagine some neat podcasting type applications, taking user generated audio and converting it to a more easily playable format.

Is this decoder legally sound? I have no idea.

On2, the company behind the VP6 video codec in Flash, recently announced that it will be adding H.264 support to its Flix product line. Big deal I hear you say, H.264 is a well known and high quality codec - it's also known as MPEG4 which is what my Apple TV digests.
Correct, but Flix is - or at least has been - a Flash video encoding tool. It hasn't really served any other pupose than dealing with FLV in some shape or form, be it encoding to FLV or transcoding to something like .3gp from FLV. So why add H.264 to the mix now? It's not a format that Flash supports, or shall I say yet?
Of course I am wildly speculating here but if H.264 support does not and will not have any relation to Flash video then why add this support to Flix? Why not create a new product, like Flox or Flax?
Of course my wish would be that I'm correct here and that On2 knows more than you and I and that they are planning ahead, maybe for the next codec update in Flash. And what a great choice H.264 would be!
Thoughts on a postcard, or in the comments if you prefer.

This is huge. Darren Lee of fczone.com has today released an Eclipse plugin which adds support for FMS's AS1-based server side code to Eclipse or Flex Builder 3. Finally FMS has its own code editor/IDE and what a great one it is.
The plugin contains more features that I care to mention, including code completion, AS2 import, an output console, code outline, error checking, you name it. I recommend you check out the screencast which makes it clear that this plugin will make our lives as FMS developers a whole lot easier. There's even an FMS project setup wizard!

I'm quite honestly speechless, this plugin is beyond anything I have seen to date for editing .ASC files, including the Flash IDE or Dreamweaver. And the best thing is that it integrates tightly with Flex Builder 3 and Eclipse so there'll be no need for flicking back and forth between IDEs. Awesome. And did I mention that this plugin is open source?
Darren, this time you have truly surpassed yourself. How come Adobe haven't hired you yet? Ok, I guess they did but 'only' for a one off gig - as Darren worked on the FMS2 admin console.
I know that Darren has put a lot of hard work into this plugin and it's astonishing what a single developer can achieve in his spare time! I wouldn't even know where to start.

Sawmill is a log file analysis tool which can injest a huge variety of log file formats and produce reports from them. Recently the company announced that it officially supports the W3C compliant logs files from Flash Media Server, which I believe is the first product to do so.
Flash Media Server logging and reporting has traditionally been a painful task as the initial versions of Flash Communication Server did not support text logs at all. W3C compliance was introduced by FMS 2 and made things a lot simpler, but there was still no easy to use report builder available. Sawmill appears to fill this gap and allows users to access performance statistics and provide usage and service level reports.

Following reading this article I had a closer look at Adobe Visual Communicator 3, the product formerly known as Serious Magic's Visual Communicator.
I have known about the product for some time but hadn't yet noticed that Adobe added or will add the ability to stream the newcast style presentation that users can create with Visual Communicator directly to Flash Media Server. Adobe states: The product can '[...] stream live Flash video presentations over the Internet using Adobe Flash Media Server'.

This is great news and it further expands the featureset and tools available for live Flash video broadcasts and events. For examaple, the product supports up to 3 connected cameras at once which will allow for back and forth switching in an interview setting. Of course all this can also be recorded, the live feature is more of an add-on really.

There's a lot more to this tool: it offers hundreds of customizable graphics, music and special effects to create video presentations that look like a television newscast. When presenting in front of a backdrop, users can digitally replace the background with an image or video. The teleprompter allows users to speak confidently without missing key points or memorizing lines.

I recommend you check out Visual Communicator 3.

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.

Here's a nice demo by Karl Soule of Adobe covering Adobe OnLocation and Ultra. Both tools have been added to Adobe's offering after the aquisition of Serious Magic.

Ultra is a tool for working with blue- or greenscreen video in a very straight forward way and it allows you to easily change backgrounds in a video and it even gives you a real time preview during the shot, amongst other things. Very cool.

OnLocation (previously called DV Rack) on the other hand provides you with an easy way of recording video directly to disk, for example on your laptop. No need for tapes anymore. I saw a demo of this at Adobe Live in London and the tool is really powerful once you take a few minutes to explore the many options its interface provides.
You can watch the recording by Karl Soule here.

It seems that the longest ever thread in the forums is starting to bear some fruit. Nellynomore (I love that name) is a Linux tool which can convert FMS recorded FLV audio/video to WAV, which you can then convert further to MP3 or whatever sound format you prefer.
Nellynomore has been developed by Mike Benham of thoughtcrime.org and it is available as a free download. You can find more info on it here.

Once again this goes to show what happens if you push developers into a corner - they find a way out of it. the current state of FLV audio codecs is not great to put it mildly with Nellymoser holding us to ransom as soon as we want to escape the dreaded FLV audio format.

A Windows utility also exists and I am hoping to cover this shortly. Watch this space.

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.

Adobe have just released a new tool by the name of FLVCheck which allows publishers to 'clean up' malformed FLV video files. FLVCheck will ensure that your files are properly formed.
The FLVCheck tool will verify internal timestamps, metadata, and message headers to help identify FLV files that may have trouble playing back from Flash Media Server.
The FLVCheck tool is a commandline utility and as of now Windows only. You can download it here.

Widevine Technologies have just announced that they have added Flash video to their list of supported video formats for their Cypher DRM technology. You can read the full press release here.
I'm not sure which approach Widevine's product takes but the company claims that Cypher 'is the first and only DRM solution that offers consumers the freedom to choose their entertainment platform while protecting the copyright and revenue streams of content owners and distributors'.
I've requested some more information but somehow doubt that this is a service which can be trialed by people like you and me ;-)

I've recently written an article for Streamingmedia.com which has just been published. It takes a look at Adobe's new Flash Media Encoder. Check out the article here.