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.

Adobe has announced the immediate release of the Flash Media Encoder (FME), a Windows desktop tool which enables users to broadcast live Flash Video using On2's VP6 codec (something that the Flash Player is not capable of at this time).
Previously there had been no other *free* tool available to accomplish this task. Flix 8 Live was the only mainstream tool to date that allowed live VP6 encoding (high end solutions from Digital Rapids aside) and this retails at USD $1,000 per year.

Live Flash Video applications and events will take a huge step forward this year, with the Amgen Tour of California (the race I believe is now over) being one of the first to step up to the plate. In this Flex application, Adobe has created a rich media interface mixing video, map data and race data, and leveraged Akamai's Beta Live Flash service running with the VP6 codec from On2.
Akamai's Live Flash service is currently in closed beta, but it has been serving about 4 Gpbs to up to 8,000 concurrent users. Not bad for starters.

FME Download
FME Release Notes (PDF)

Here's a live feed using the new Flash Media Encoder.
I am broadcasting a video only stream (no audio) using VP6 at 200kbps, 12fps. The camera is a standard USB webcam from Creative. Note that this blog post will only make sense for today while I am running the broadcast...

This is great news for anyone looking for a desktop encoder which facilitates live VP6 video: Adobe have just released the public beta version of Flash Media Encoder (FME) on Labs.
FME, which is Windows only, is ideal for live event broadcasts as it adds VP6 support to live Flash Video - something which the Flash Player itself is not capable of (it only supports Spark for live encoding). The only other option to date was a tool by On2 called Flix 8 Live, which retails at around $1,000 per year. FME on the other hand is.. wait for it... likely to be free!
Says Adobe: "The intent is to make the Flash Media Encoder available as a free download for customers with a valid Flash Media Server license or FVSS account."
And then: "The Flash Media Encoder beta gives technical producers the chance to create live video broadcasts using Flash. It's targeted towards those users who have a camera hooked up to their computer via USB, Firewire or via a capture card such as an Osprey or Digital Rapids card, and want to encode and stream captured video into the Flash Media Server (FMS) or Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS)."

So to sum up: FME allows you to encode live Flash Video (not pre-recorded material, there are other tools that do that) using VP6 and it is likely to be free if you are a FVSS customer or own a FMS license.

I'll try and get my laptop rigged up and put a sample feed up later today. I've already had a chance to test the tool and it's more fully featured than On2's offering.

Digital Rapids just announced the release of a On2 VP6 encoding module which works with its Digital Rapids Stream family of media encoding solutions.
Digital Rapids' products usually consist of a hardware and software bundle (such as a capture card and encoding software) aimed at Video Professionals. Adding On2 VP6 to their products essentially introduces Flash Video (and in particular live) streaming to users who are more familiar with tyraditional streaming technologies such as Windows Media or Real. The offering is the first alternative to Flix 8 Live which has so far been the only tool to stream VP6 based Flash Video live.

From the press release: "The optional On2 VP6 support is integrated throughout the Stream systems' robust workflow and feature set. Content can be encoded to VP6 while simultaneously encoding to other formats, and processing such as graphic overlay can be applied. Live content can also be archived to file in VP6 and other formats seamlessly during live Flash Video streaming. Based on On2's workstation-level licensing structure, Digital Rapids' On2 VP6 module includes distribution rights for content created with the VP6 codec, allowing customers to distribute VP6-encoded material professionally without additional licensing fees."
So no more excuses, ok? ;-)

How on earth did I miss this one? Sorry Burak, I have only just see the brilliant FLVMDV, a neat little Windows XP (!) property sheet extension which displays FLV metadata information.
You can download FLVMDV for free here.

Just a quick one before the weekend: FDT (a great ActionScript editor) by Powerflasher has just been updated to version 1.5.
It now requires Eclipse 3.1 or above (which means it will also work reliably with 3.2) and is available as a free update for registered users.
More info on FDT here.

This may not be news to some of you as this information has previously been posted to the chattyfig Flashcomm list (which is currently down) but I think it may be more visible here, thereby eliminating further questions or confusion.
As you may be aware Adobe had previously announced the existence of a tool that would allow the conversion of FLV files (the audio portion thereof) to mp3. FLV uses (when recorded by Flash Media Server) the Nellymoser audio codec which is near impossible to transcode unless you pay licensing fees to Nellymoser directly. This shuts the door on many applications such as Flash based podcasting.

After the question regarding this tool came up once again on the Flash Media List, Steve Wolkoff (FMS Product Manager at Adobe) added the following comments:

Start quote: "[...] We found a clause in our license agreement with NellyMoser that does not allow Adobe to distribute a transcoder outside of FMS. I.e. - the tool would have to be delivered with FMS, and only used with FLVs created by FMS. Otherwise, we would be in violation of our license agreement.

I'm not sure why our license is structured in that way, as I was not around when it was negotiated, but it's a fact of life at this point. I can't really comment on legal issues, so I won't be able to provide much more detail here.

However, We may be able to work around this with some installer and EULA wrangling - i.e. bundle the tool with the FMS installer, and add language to the EULA prohibiting use with any other server technology - I am working on verifying that. In the meanwhile, we have done some private beta testing with this tool, and found a number of issues. We have developers working on it currently and we should have another small private Beta in a few weeks. (Unfortunately, the Betas have to be private at this point, due to the license issues noted above). If this EULA workaround is ok with Legal, we will try to move to a public Beta soon after.
Sorry, no time frame at this point." End quote.

Hopefully this will clarify the situation surrounding this tool for the time being.

An article by Lisa Larson today on StreamingMedia.com tries to address concerns raised by a previous post on this site.
Sorenson is now issuing temporary serial numbers which enables the Squeeze application to encode an unlimited number of files per day and month. Read the entire article here, the older post on the topic can be found here.

Unfortunately I did not make it to FlashForward but through an article by Lisa Larson on streamingmedia.com I heard of a new server software called WowzaTV. It's supposed to be an alternative to Flash Media Server (like Red5 promises to be) offering features such as streaming Flash Video, recordings and the like. The fact that this light weight server has been developed by two former Adobe employees is probably an encouraging sign.
I wish the company great success (not too sure about the name guys) and welcome any addition to the streaming Flash Video market. Having a choice is a great thing and I will make sure to keep an eye on developments at Wowza.