The recently announced FMLE 3.1 for Mac OSX will finally bring this essential tool to the Mac platform. This can't come soon enough as it has been requested for a very long time.

FMLE 3.1 for Mac will work with the built-in iSight camera as well as devices such as Firewire cameras and video capture cards to support a broad range of use cases and workflows. Like the Windows version, the Mac version of FMLE 3.1 will be free.

A release date has not yet been announced, but you can register an interest in a private beta by signing up here.

You can find Jens's article here.

This is a fairly significant addition to the Flash Platform. While I'm not a fan of DRM, I understand that some content owners are very keen to add (what they perceive as) protection to their assets, and Flash will soon be capable to tick that box. The technology works in a similar fashion to the way in which the Adobe Media Player used to handle content protection: a DRM server called Flash Access 2.0 - which was also announced at IBC and which is basically a renamed release of Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server (I'm glad that I won't have to type that name again!) - will handle the signing and protection aspects, while Flash Player can soon deal with the decryption and content access mechanisms natively. As mentioned above, this was previously only an option if Adobe AIR was used to build the client. I guess these new features and the demise of Adobe Media Player shows that end users prefer to consume content right inside the browser, and are less keen to install and use yet another video player onto their desktop. Those who prefer to use AIR to deliver their content can still do so as the runtime will also support the content protection features which Flash Access 2.0 promises. Here's the full press release.

Adobe Flash Access 2.0 is planned for commercial availability in the first half of 2010.

I present to you . It's a little tag tat does wonders to your Flex Builder 3 Console, and I don't know why it isn't being promoted much more. I've been using it for quite a while, and while I do not recall how I discovered it I am sure it's never too late to tell the world all about it.

So what does TraceTarget do? In a nutshell it outputs a ton of logging information into your Console when you debug your Flex project, and in particular it tells you a lot about the Remoting calls that you are undoubtedly making. Here's an example of my current project, first without TraceTarget added:

The Twittersphere is buzzing with chatter about the deal which sees Google handing over around $106.5 million - peanuts in Google's world, a company which is valued at over $150 billion (who really cares about a few billion here or there :).
I'm wondering what this deal means for Flash video and for HTML5. I guess that in the short term, Flash will be unaffected since there is now a clear move towards H.264, and existing license agreements with On2 should remain unaffected too. But what about HTML5? This new standard (which actually isn't one yet) is in real need of a *decent* video codec which is not burdened with royalty fees (as may or may not be the case with H.264).

No surprise that this deal is seen by some (mainly TechCrunch commentators) as yet another Flash (video) killer. Yawn. Others speculate that Google may open source one or more codecs, or make them freely available. That's speculation right now and I could see it go either way, there are many reasons for one or the other (or neither) to happen. We'll see.

Then there are Google's communication tools - a decent video codec is handy for those to say the least, and it's no surprise that Skype is one of the VP7 licensees.

This is a smart move by Google, and I'm actually surprised they haven't done this sooner. The price they paid seems a bargain too, and so Google will soon own the codec technologies which power the majority of web video today. We'll see what Google's plans are from here, but since they do no evil we have nothing to worry about, right? Right? Hello, anyone here?

The full press release can be seen here.

Admittedly the learning curve will be a bit steep for some but I have no doubt that we will soon see a few more packaged and easy to digest players pop up which can be used 'off the shelf'. I also expect all the major CDNs to release plugins for OSMF or document ways to interface with their backends - as we know, almost every major CDN currently has its own quirky way of connecting and playing a Flash stream.

There's more to OSMF than what I can cover here and I suggest you head over to the Adobe website and check it out for yourself.

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.

Usage

Thanks Robert!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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 ;-)

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.