Amongst all the noise that is currently being emitted after the jesusiPad announcement there are a also some high quality gems of content emerging, and Mike Melanson's piece on the different problems which the Flash Player solves when it comes to video delivery is one of them.

In particular Mike explains how a desktop video player and Flash Player differ. One obvious difference which surprisingly often gets overlooked, is that Flash Player is not just a video delivery medium but so much more than that. If you think back a few years there was barely any support for video in the Flash Player, and the only reason we hear so many complaints about its performance is due to the fact that so many people are using it these days. Flash has had an unprecedented growth curve when it comes to video delivery on the web, but it was a popular plugin way before then.
The issue Mike explains well in his article is that of users comparing apples to oranges a lot of the time: they compare a browser plugin to a desktop tool. In Mike's words, "a desktop player usually plays a linear media file from start to finish. Flash Player solves a different problem: It plays linear media files from start to finish while combining the video with a wide array of graphical and interactive elements (buttons, bitmaps, vector graphics, filters), as well as providing network, webcam, and microphone facilities, all programmable via a full-featured scripting language, and all easily accessible via a web browser using a plugin that most of the browsing population already has installed."

Mike's article in full can be found here. Please bookmark it and send to everyone who asks you next time: "Can you explain why a video player like VLC can play the same flv file with less CPU usage than the Flash Player?".

And the main takeaway: "The Flash Player works to solve the problem of making video accessible via the web browsing environment. In contrast, a desktop media player plays a file using a dedicated, single-purpose application."

I'm finally finding a bit of time (at 10pm) to upload a little video demo that had been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of months. The premise was that I wanted to have a play with the new dynamic bitrate streaming feature in Flash Media Server so I grabbed a trailer from Apple's website, fired up Flash Media Encoder and encoded the District 9 HD clip into 3 bitrates to .f4v format: 400kbps (low bitrate), 800kbps (medium bitrate) and 1.5mbits (high bitrate).
Video quality was not my primary goal here (as you can probably see from the footage), instead I just wanted to see how hard or easy it is to get something like this up and running. Bottom line: not too difficult at all.
I've got a copy of FMS 3.5, a dedicated server (UK based) with a decent bandwidth allowance so I figured why not release this into a the wild?
One thing that you should pay attention to is the actual bitrate switching. If your connection speed is very stable then you may right-click the player and choose to manual switching - let me know if you can tell when the delivered bitrate changes, I bet you can't. And that's the beauty of this technology in a nutshell: seamless switching between bitrates. Pretty neat. Note you can also click the little HD icon/bandwidth bar to bring up a console with stats about the video and playback.

I'm sure some of you will ask for sources, but to be honest there aren't really any to share. I just grabbed the Open Video Player and configured it completely via flashvars, so I have not even got a FLA I could show you. As for the video settings I used - sorry but I can't honestly remember. All I recall is that I downsized the clip a bit so the resolution is not the same as in the original source footage, and no other fancy settings were used. As I said I simply encoded using the Flash Media Encoder.
Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

There are situations where it is necessary to call a server side method on FMS. Some CDNs, for example Limelight, used to or maybe still do require you to call the FCSubscribe method in order to request a live stream. This send a signals to the Edge server to pull the live stream from the Origin server if it is not already being delivered to that Edge. While this delivery method and stream setup routine is being phased out across most CDNs I thought it may be useful to post a (slightly hackish) workaround to make this setup work with the FLVPlayback component.
The problem with the FLVPlayback component is that there is no obvious, simple way to obtain a reference to the NetConnection Object it uses under the hood. Sure, the ncMgr.getNetConnection let's you grab it but only once the connection is established, and while you can implement a custom NCManager class, this is not trivial and after all a NetConnection is being maintained already by the component, so why reinvent the wheel?

The following code is clearly not something I am proud of, but it worked at the time when I needed it. It was used to get a live stream working with the FLVPlayback component streaming from Limelight about a year or two ago.

Hopefully this is helpful to someone.

Jan just posted a great article about Silverlight, Flash and RIAs in general. As expected, Jan approaches the topic from a video angle, but comes to some of the same conclusions as many of us here in the Flash camp: "If Microsoft dropped Silverlight tomorrow, most web site owners and 'Netizens' wouldn't even notice, or care if they did."

And of course I'd like to give Jan a hug for quotes such as "Flash caught on because it provided design functionality that HTML couldn't match and solved problems that no other technology could. It succeeded because website designers, developers and owners wanted it, not because Adobe needed it."

Very true. And that also means that Adobe gave those designers, developers and content owners the right tools for the job at the right time. Let's not underestimate the foresight Adobe had back in 2000 or so - long before anyone ever heard of Youtube and the like - when the foundations were laid to make Flash the de facto video standard on the web. While I doubt they envisaged quite this level of success they were certainly aiming for it. Has Adobe been able to leverage the success of Flash video and turn it into a money spinner for themselves? Not really. But have they managed to secure the future of the Flash platform for some time to come? Definitely.

It's onwards and upwards from here for Flash video. Adobe is undoubtedly busy cooking new and clever features in the labs, and anyone who has seen or watched the RTMFP sneak peaks at MAX knows that this technology could be another game changer. I can't wait to see more. There are many good ideas still to be had.

PS: I recommend you read Jan's full article, including the first part which focuses more on UGC and H.264.

I was recently tasked with upgrading the video player for the Kiwanis Convention website. The event itself has now passed but the videos are still online, you can check them here.

The client already had a video player in place but wanted to offer a better experience to users on slower connections as some users reported problems viewing the single file, high bandwidth versions without constant rebuffering.
I upgraded the existing FLVPlayback component to the latest version 2.5 and deployed a bunch of SMIL based XML files, one for each clip, which in turn pointed to the different videos.

My friend Jan has a great article on H.264 video production on his site. You can read the first part below, and catch the rest on his blog.

Introduction
As a producer of video on the web, you know that you're judged by the quality of your video. In this regard, many producers are considering converting from the venerable On2 VP6 codec to H.264. H.264 offers better visual quality than VP6, and the AAC audio codec offers much better quality than the MP3 codec paired with VP6. Starting with Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, you could play back files encoded in H.264/AAC formats. As of September 2008, the penetration of H.264/AAC-compatible players exceeded 89% in all Internet-connected PCs. No wonder they're switching over.

This article first discusses the issues involved in such a changeover, including the potential requirement for royalties. I then describe the H.264-specific encoding parameters offered by most encoding programs. Finally, I cover how you can produce H.264 video with Adobe Media Encoder CS4 and Adobe Flash Media Encoding Server 3.5.

Sumner Paine, Product Manager of the new Strobe media framework, recently presented on this very topic to the FMS User Group. You can see the recording here.

If you haven't heard about Strobe yet, the official summary is: "Strobe provides new delivery and monetization options for video distribution. Anyone can develop modules that plug into Strobe media players and enable things like advertising insertion, content delivery and syndication, micropayments, viewer authentication, transaction handling, and business model controls. With an open framework, the future of web video monetization can be developed collaboratively with lower costs and faster turnaround."

Watch the recording here.

My friend Jan was recently asked by a client for a list of H.264-related references. And Jan figured that if these references are worthwhile to his client, perhaps they might be worthwhile for you, so here they are. For much more great content around all things streaming check out Jan's Streaminglearningcenter.com.

General H.264

Wikipedia - it all starts with Wikipedia, but you probably knew that. Here you can find all you need to know about profiles, levels and entropy encoding (oh, my!).

The Future's So Bright: H.264 Year in Review. Before you recommend H.264 to a client, or for internal use, you need to know that H.264 comes with some baggage, in the form of royalties (yes, royalties). In fact, depending upon how you're currently deploying H.264 encoded video, you might already have triggered a royalty obligation. Read all about it here, as well as why H.264 adaption has been relatively slow among major broadcasters and corporations.

Adobe is to discontinue the content syndication through the Adobe Media Player (AMP), essentially laying the whole initiative to rest reports NewTeeVee.

Personally I'm not surprised. The shows that were available in AMP did not really appeal to me and the format of a desktop media player was also not what consumers seemed to want or indeed need - Joost anyone? The 'iTunes for video' concept simply did not catch on.
Strobe, the new media player framework that was recently announced, now appears to be taking center stage and is being pushed as the way forward when it comes to building media players (initially for the web but we all know how easy it is to turn a Flex based application into an AIR based client), and the coverage on NewTeeVee seems to suggest that even Adobe had their problems when building AMP, contributing to the birth of Strobe.

R.I.P. Adobe Media Player, I won't be missing you though.

Adobe Strobe is the code-name for a new video player framework with an aim to help drive standards for media players.
Strobe is a great idea and sorely needed. These days every publisher, agency, developer, CDN and ad network are rolling their own video players and integration logic which means there is virtually no best practices approach as far as industry standards go. Why? Because there are no standards as of now, and you can bet that video player A which was developed with CDN B in mind will not work with CDN C unless some pretty major surgery is applied to the player's code.

Strobe is trying to alleviate these pains by providing a player framework which can be extended through a plug-in model. For example the connection routine between CDN A and CDN B differs drastically. In this case Strobe should (once released) allow both CDNs to provide connection routine plug-ins for Strobe (these may simply be some ActionScript3 classes) which developers can leverage easily without having to rework their existing video player code - provided it is built on top of Strobe.

Connection routines are of course just one aspect. Other implementation points may include advertising insertion, content syndication, micropayments, viewer authentication, transaction handling, and business model controls.

According to the FAQ Adobe Strobe is planned for release around the third quarter of 2009.

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.

Many of you may know that MIX09 is in full swing and Microsoft has announced not only Silverlight 3 Beta but also added some new live streaming capabilities to its platform.
Once of those additions is a feature called Live Smooth Streaming which, if I understand it correctly, provides the equivalent to Adobe's dynamic bitrate streaming by offering fallback bitrates if the connection speed on the user's side fluctuates. The term 'Live Smooth Streaming' is a little bit deceptive however since this service - as far as I understand it - is not true streaming at all, however it comes close to a streaming experience. Instead it uses chunks of HTTP progressively downloaded material to provide a stream-like experience. I guess 'Live Smooth HTTP Download' doesn't sound as sexy.

Another feature is the so-called Live PVR, basically a total rip-off of Adobe's DVR functionality introduced recently to FMS which lets users rewind a live event and catch up to it as well. Microsoft describes their service as a 'PVR in the cloud', and it runs on top of IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008. Ben Waggoner has all the details, mixed in with some marketing fluff.

While it's great to see competition take hold in this space I would really wish for Microsoft to be more innovative at times. Of course they are playing catch up with Flash on the Silverlight front, but I generally expect them to be more experienced in the video streaming space (they've been doing this for much longer than Adobe). We've seen a glimpse of the fact that Microsoft is able to innovate during the preview of the out-of-browser install feature in Silverlight 3, but the blatant copy of Adobe's DVR functionality seems a bit cheap to me. If copying can't be avoided then so be it, but couldn't you at least differentiate the feature a little bit, or top it somehow? That would really get Adobe into gear too and maybe speed up some of their own initiatives - I've heard they are working some new FMS features.

The Open Video Player initiative has just (rather silently) released version 2.0 of their player framework.
Open Video Player is a framework for building media players and currently features versions for both Silverlight and the Flash Platform (which includes Flex). In their own words: "The Open Video Player Initiative is a community project dedicated to sharing player code and best practices around video player development and monetization." It is supported by Adobe Akamai, Microsoft and others. Akamai in particular (thanks to Will Law) seems to be pushing the updates on the Flash front.

In short, this framework tries to encourage industry standards and best practices around video player development. A great idea since the video player itself must have been re-invented thousands of times by hundreds of developers. I now encounter clients who specifically ask about this framework, and adding it to your toolkit would not be a bad idea (it certainly beats the FLVPlayback component...).

My friend Jan Ozer has just published an interesting article about the specifics of YouTube's HD video (and audio) encoding parameters.
Jan's used a variety of tools to take a peek at the internals of the produced H.264 material and made several observations in regards to bitrate, resolution, encoding profile and more. One of the takeaways is that the preferred resolution should be 720p, higher formats are likely a waste of bandwidth since YouTube would downsize them anyway.

Check out Jan's article for many more details.

Not my words but those of the Wall Street Journal and Lost Remote, talking about the MSNBC Inauguration video player. They are right though, this player is pretty cool and the features can honestly be described as innovative: the Inauguration site allows users to highlight parts of the closed captioning transcript next to the video and then embed just the selected pieces on other sites, playing only the parts one has selected.

The technology used to deliver? No, not Silverlight but Flash (did you really think I'd blog this if it wasn't? :-)

It's a bit of a shame though that there' are a bunch teething problems with this player - runtime errors whizzing past when you access the player using a debug version of Flash, and the embed didn't work well for me either since it played the whole video and not the part I highlighted, and at times I got even served the mobile version of the site!? Could someone give the guys at MSNBC some ActionScript training please ;-) Ok, I am kidding, credit where credit is due and I am sure they will get it all fixed in time.

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.

If you have - like myself - promised to eat your left shoe if Microsoft does not add H.264 support to Silverlight (a codec which Flash has been supporting for some time now) soon then you are officially off the hook now. Unsurprisingly, later this week Microsoft will demonstrate the playback of H.264-based video in Silverlight. What else will they be adding? You guessed it, AAC audio support. Where did I come across that before... oh yeah that's right: Flash.

You can read more about it here (it appears to be Microsoft's own press department posing the questions in this Q&A so don't expect anything too objective...), and no doubt there'll be a lot of press releases coming out of IBC later this week.

I know I am late blogging this but initially I didn't think it was that big a deal. A press release made the rounds outlining Adobe's deal with the NFL to stream the NBC Sunday Night Football games on NFL.com and NBCSports.com live using Flash video. As some of you may know, NBC covered most of the Olympics in North America using Silverlight technology.
Several sites were quick to announce that NBC Dumped Silverlight and that they ran back to Flash, and while the story is certainly a big achievement for Flash as a platform I don't think that any other technology got dumped during the proceedings. Remember, the Olympics are over - and the initial arrangement between NBC and Microsoft covered the Olympics - not the NFL, not the Premier League, not the annual nativity play.

It's great to hear of another major achievement for our beloved platform but I think we should chill out a bit and take the announcement for what is is, and not for what can be read into it. I bet Silverlight just needs time to mature... ;-)

If you are blood thirsty then here's more for you.

And I do not mean information on maps... No. Britain From Above is probably the best program on UK television at the moment - in my opinion anyway. When I first watched it I didn't quite know what to expect, I guess I thought it would be someone shooting video out of a plane for an hour. How wrong I was.

Each episode of this series focuses on a particular topic such as the UK transport network, abandoned industries or the transformation of London over the years. One really innovative piece which I found especially interesting was the visual mapping of information over a map of Britain or London. This involved visualising data such as landline telephone calls in all major UK cities, GPS data traces from taxis across London or the air traffic movements over the UK.

The BBC will be adding several channels to its online simulcast lineup shortly, including BBC Four, CBBC and CBeebies. This is in addition to the already announced simulcast (read: live streaming) of BBC One.

Viewing habits and TV consumption is rapidly changing and this announcement just underlines the obvious trend. I'm sure future generations will find it very strange indeed that programs used to start at set times. Of course the really cool thing about this announcement is the fact that Flash will once again play a key role, since the streams are likely to be streamed via the iPlayer or one of its live-streaming-baby-brothers. Personally, I'm determined to ride this wave... watch this space.

The full press release is here.

And the usual disclaimer for everyone not in the UK: sorry but you'll be GEOIP blocked when trying to access any of the BBC streams. Those fortunate enough to be in the UK must hold a valid TV license (yes, no kidding, even if you have no TV but watch on a laptop or mobile phone).

If you are using the FLVPlayback component in combination with a custom UI seekbar component then you may have asked yourself why the seekbar is not clickable. Many video players implement this functionality: rather than having to find the handle, drag it and let go it is possible to click the seekbar anywhere to jump to that point.

Fortunately it is ot too difficult to add this piece of behaviour. The following code is applicable to an instance of the FLVPlayback component on stage (instance name 'player') not using a skin but using a custom UI seekbar component (instance name 'seekbar').

Give that a try and you should be able to click the seekbar to jump to any point in the video (provided you are streaming or - if using progressive download - the video has already loaded up to the part you are trying to seek to).

The BBC have started to roll out an updated version of the iPlayer which offers a new 'high quality' option, delivering video encoded in H.264 at 800kbps. And wow, does it look sweet (unfortunately I cannot embed the image here as it's too large). And that's before you blow it up to fullscreen - I played it on my 24" iMac and the quality was truly impressive. What's more important though is the fact that this player is so easy to access, and videos play without rebuffering. Click and watch, it cannot get any easier.

This news is pretty major, considering that Flash Player 9 is required to play the H.264 encoded content. "Back in December of last year, relatively few people had installed the Flash player needed to play H.264 content; now almost 80% of BBC iPlayer users have it", says Anthony Rose on the BBC Internet Blog. Clearly this sets a benchmark and should convince any doubters that Flash Player 9's features are now totally ready for mainstream - including its hardware acceleration features.

I wish the whole world could access the iPlayer pages because it is an online experience that's largely unrivaled. I've heard that the BBC is thinking about releasing some worldwide content - you should look forward to it.

There's lost more info about the H.264 rollout on the BBC Blog.

By Jan Ozer, producer of Critical Skills for Final Cut Pro Streaming Producers

A while back I shared some playback performance numbers comparing the required CPU horsepower to play VP6, H.264 and VC-1 files. Briefly, in that test, I tested playback from the desktop using the FLV Player, QuickTime Pro and Windows Media Player, respectively.

While testing for my next training DVD, Critical Skills DVD for Final Cut Studio Streaming Producers, I rethought the test, deciding that it made more sense to test using the Flash and Silverlight Players, since that's how most of the audience would view these files. In this lengthy report, I'll detail the procedures and describe my findings.

CBS have launched their redesigned Flash based video player supporting H.264 HD videos. Viewers are able to watch full length episodes of their favorite shows such as CSI, Criminal Minds and How I met Your Mother, to name but a few.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to bring up any of the content which I presume is down to geographical restrictions. Hopefully viewers from the US could try the player and tell us about their experience by leaving a comment below.

Forget spinning cubes with video stuck on their sides and instead check out the demo below. From Immersive Media, same the guys that brought you street view on Google Maps, comes an innovative new way to navigate 360 degrees inside a live playing video. How is it delivered? Flash of course.

Check out this demo. Once the main content starts to play you can click inside the video and drag your mouse into the direction you want to view. Make sure you check out the snowboarders at about 1 minute in - and follow them as they go over the kicker.

There are more demos here.

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.

Fabio 'Encoding Wizard' Sonnati has outdone himself once again and published an HD resolution video clip on his site. What's stunning about this example is the low bitrate of only 500kbit.sec, while maintaining an amazing quality.

Double click the video to go full screen. Nice job Fabio!

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.

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.

Two words: jaw dropping. Check out this demo (double click to go full screen!) by Fabio 'I eat codecs for breakfast' Sonnati. Encoded at a mere 500bkit/sec this demonstrates just how well the H.264 codec can perform at low bitrates. Check Fabio's blog for more details and watch out for more upcoming demos.
I wonder if he will share his encoding settings with us. One thing I can guarantee already is that he set smoothing to true ;-)