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 ;-)

...from one of Europe's biggest Skateboard and BMX contests. Freecaster.tv will be are streaming live in high quality Flash video using Kulabyte's upcoming two pass live encoder. Yes, two pass live...
Check out this page over the weekend. Sweet, this is my kind of event. Anyone remember the Muenster Monster Mastership of '89? Were you there?

UPDATE: the stream is now live and I'm able to offer you the feed live here. Check it out and make sure you go full screen! The quality is very good that it's hard to believe that this is a live stream! Bandwidth courtesy of Interoute, delivery courtesy of Wowza, player courtesy of me ;-)

FURTHER UPDATE: the live feed has been removed from this post as the event is now over.

Or streaming over download; or Flash over P2P, or online over offline. Who knows, read whatever you like into the fact that 8 times more people access the BBC's iPlayer content via the browser based streaming version (Flash video) rather than the Windows-only, P2P based download player for which the Beeb had received a lot of bad press. Why didn't they listen to me from the start? :-)
For those who don't know, the BBC now offers all TV content for online viewing, on demand for up to one week after it has aired. sorry, but the iPlayer is only accessible if you are in the UK. Silly, I know but then I don't make the rules.

Fabio has posted a very nice H.264 video on his blog which he encoded using the free FFMPEG tool. This file played absolutely smoothly on my standard, consumer grade ADSL line and while I am not sure about the encoding bitrate used here I would like to point out that the video looks tons better than the so called Digital TV signal that Sky is pushing down on me. And Fabio's demo was running at 1600x1200 on my screen.

This year will be an awesome one for Flash video. I hope some clever developer will add some interactivity and community tools to this sort of viewing experience. Whoever said that Tv was dead was dead right. Hey, that gives me an idea...

Adobe have just launched the prerelease 2 version of their Adobe Media Player (AMP). This second version brings the Player in line with Beta 3 of AIR, Adobe's cross platform desktop runtime, and it adds a few new features such as H.264 support, hardware acceleration for fullscreen playback as well as new video scaling options during playback.

Or maybe I should say pseudo-stream... but hey, at least the headline got you to read the post :-)
I'm sure that by now you all know about this popular PHP approach to serving FLV videos progressively, but with the added benefit of being able to seek to any part of the video more or less immediately - something that traditional progressive delivery is not capable of.
The PHP approach (which in the meantime has been ported to many other server side languages such as ASP and ColdFusion) is targeted squarely at FLV delivery, a format which may lose a bit of its popularity over the coming months as H.264 support for Flash video becomes more widely available.
But fear not, because the clever guys from code-shop have alread been busy developing a H.264 pseudo streaming plugin for Lighty, a very light weight and performant webserver. The plugin allows Lighty to serve up H.264 encoded video content in an almost identical way to the 'old school' PHP method. The implementation as a webserver plugin is also much more efficient than the script based approach (which itself is not bad at all).
You can check out a demo here.

...and this one even works on my Mac!
After having received heavy criticism for rolling out a download based video player which only worked on Windows, the BBC have now teamed up with Adobe and launched the beta version of their new Flash and FMS powered streaming video player, niftly names iPlayer (has Apple sued them yet?).
No longer need UK based viewers miss recent episodes of The Mighty Boosh or Spooks, as virtually all BBC programs are archived and available online for up to 7 days after they have aired.
As some of you may know it is compulsory in the UK (if you own a TV) to pay a yearly license fee (roughly GBP 100 or thereabouts), the so called TV License, with which the BBC is funded. A lot of money but it also means no advertising and on occasion quite reasonable programming, at least compared to German TV, whose private broadcasters have become unwatchable (even their websites look like the home shopping channel...).

While the iPlayer's content is only available to UK viewers (legally that is, we all know where to get our content from I presume) there are plans for an international version in the future. May I just add that restricting viwership to the UK seems plain stupid to me while the BBC's satellite signal can be picked up all over Europe anyway!?

Ok, I am going way off topic but take this away: having the BBC use Flash and FMS for their iPlayer is huge and gives our much loved platform a great push and massive exposure. There's also no need to log into the site anymore - it just works (even on Linux), as expected, where previously only users with Windows XP using IE were able to access the iPlayer's content (wasn't that a great idea). In this case it seems that common sense has prevailed, and that doesn't happen too often these days.

The BBC's much criticized iPlayer will add the Flash Player to deliver the BBC's content to a cross platform audience, something the current Windows-only iPlayer is not capable off. This is big news as Flash video will become a major part of the BBC's content delivery infrastructure and it significantly deepends the partnership between the BBC and Adobe.
More in depth news over at streamingmedia.com.

It's not too much to ask for is it? If Real really wants to be in the headlines then they've just succeeded as I've decided to blog about this topic until this type of interference is eradicated. Maybe Real's engineers are simply bad programmers or maybe their marketing team decided that breaking existing content is ok as long as video can be ripped successfully. But Flash developers do not find this funny and I'm unsure as to how much good it will do to restore a Real-ly bad reputation of an intrusive and annoying piece of software.
In the meantime, this page on OSFlash is a good place to aggregate all Real Player issues.
Don't sit still until Real Player starts breaking your own content, blog about it, make a fuss. Once this Player gets pushed out on a bigger scale the problem could get a lot worse.

Note upfront: you need the latest Flash Player 9 Beta to watch these videos. This also means you have to uninstall your current Flash Player. I've had a few issues on my Vista machine (more trouble than it's worth) but it worked nicely on my MacBook Pro. That being said it runs on Vista now too, but not very well. I do have lots of problems with iTunes and QT on this machine and encountered another Stop error while writing this post... argh.

Watch the samples here.

The samples use 4 different videos. The movie trailers are all from Apple.com while the Backcountry clip is from Adobe. The trailers all use H.264 video in 720p resolution (1280x720), however the Shrek trailer is quite dark. Make sure you hit the full screen button. My 2.21Ghz Vista machine really seems to struggle, but it struggles with .MOV also. Also note that I haven't implemented any of the performance tips which Adobe recommend. Be patient, each video is between 50MB and 100MB in size. It's using a 10 second buffer - not recommended for dial-up :-) If things seem slow now then please try again later.

A heads up: the FLVPlayback component will currently not accept files with a .mp4 extension. I had a hard time getting it to work and had already rolled another player when I tried simply appending .flv to it. That did the trick and my mp4 files now use a naming convention of Rendition.mov.flv, even though it complained that the file can't be opened. trust me it can once you run it in a browser. I am sure this will be fixed in a future update for FLVPlayback.
The Flash Player simply ignores the file extension (once the file is loaded) and figures out the contents by itself by looking into the file. So even though it says .flv on the outside it's got H.264 inside. Note also that watching of videos does not seem to work inside the Flash IDE, presumably it is using an older Player there.

Lastly I am making my FLA file available for download. You need Flash CS3 to open it.

Have fun. If my site goes down later today you'll know why :-) Donations in form of a CDN account for downloadable content are most welcome.

There's some more great info on H.264 here.

According to Beet.tv, who have a video interview with Chris Hock, the Adobe Media Player will be delayed until next year. A beta is expected this year.
I'm not sure if the player had been announced for this year or not but in any case it's not long now, even if the release is indeed pushed forward a bit.
I have been lucky enough to see some demos of the Adobe Media player and it's a very nice app and worth the wait in any case ;-)

I'm following Keith's advise to post this alert. In case you haven't heard aboutthe issue yet, the latest Real Player Beta (and I believe all the previously released Real Player 11 Betas) can seriously affect the functionality of some SWF content that's deployed on the web. The worst bug appears to be an interference with parameters that a SWF movie may pass when connecting to Flash Media Server, which in effect breaks that movie's functionality.

To simplify, certain deployed applications will work fine before a user installs Real Player 11 Beta and cease to work once Real Player 11 Beta is installed.
This would not be such a major problem if the Real Player Beta was offered to a selected audience for thorough testing - in which bugs can be expected. Which is what you would expect from a Beta program. But this player is available directly from Real's homepage and it is the most prominent download link for the Real Player full stop. This in turn means that many users install the player without being fully aware that they are essentially downloading a possibly (and in this case a definite) bug ridden version.

One can only speculate what Real Player is doing to the content it intercepts but as outlined by Matt Spragins, Director of Product at RealPlayer, it 'loads its own SWF before other SWFs are loaded in order to determine where videos are located on a web page'.

Backgrounder: the latest Real Player allows users to download content which was otherwise destined for web only viewing, a feature which has been met with mixed reviews and claims of possible copyright infringement.

On july 25th Real announced that it was aware of the issue and is fixing this bug but as of today (August 1st) no update has been released and the affected version is still available from the Real.com homepage.
But hey, at least it gets people talking about Real Player.

We all know that Flash video is everywhere these days but what surprises me is how little quality control appears to be applied to the footage that big brands push out these days. And I'm not talking about the content but the video itself. The production effort going into these clips is usually very high but what about encoding? Why do I see video which is not deinterlaced time and time again when it's so easy to fix? Aren't the companies behind this footage supposed to be professionals?

How do you spot intelaced video? Easy: "After compression there are lines in my movie".
Interlacing occurs when footage that is shot to be displayed on TV is put on the web without much thought going into the delivery medium. Tradional analogue TV systems such as PAL, Secam and NTSC display an interlaced picture which is made up of individual lines that are added to the screen in odd and even numbers. Without deinterlacing techniques, such an image can show very obvious signs of linear artifacts, especially in high motion sequences.

Examples:
Ikea Business. Nice big Flash video pieces but wait until somebody moves... It looks like this.

Will it Blend. Brilliant site, shame about the stripes (and the iPhone).

I know this article makes me sound like a know-it-all but interlacing artifacts are so easy to spot and mega easy to rectify. Most encoders require you to tick one box and that's it, job done.

Sorenson Squeeze: I think this tool's deinterlacing option is under the Filter Settings.

On2 Flix: Load a video into the tool, then under the file tab click Video Editor, then check the deinterlace checkbox.

Adobe Flash CS3 Video Encoder: Load a file, go to the Video tab, check the deinterlace checkbox (I believe this option is new to CS3).

In my opinion the deinterlace option should be a default. amateurs can be excused for not knowing this and quite honestly it's not a big problem for home movies. But Ikea? And pure video sites such as Will it Blend? Heck even the New York Times sported interlaced video for a while.

So next time your video looks stripy remember to deinterlace.

Here's another video from video.onflex.org. In it you can see Deeje Cooley demoing some more of the upcoming Adobe Media Player, codenamed Philo. Watch the video here.

Enjoy.

...and this is not an Apple TV hack I'm talking about but an announcement by Google and Apple regarding a partnership which will bring YouTube content to the Apple TV (I've got one and it rocks, this will make it even better).
Note though that I did not say 'Flash video' on the Apple TV, nope. All YouTube content is first being transcoded using H.264 in order to make it playable on Apple TV. Which brings me to my main point: Please Adobe, could you add H.264 support to the Flash Player? Not to make it play on Apple TV without conversion but to bring the Flash Player codec offerings up to date. And while you're at it could you throw in some new audio codecs too? :-)

Another video on Adobe Media Player is making the rounds. You can check it out here. Deeje Cooley from Adobe not only demos the player but also talks about the branding features, RSS integration amongst other features. Well worth checking out.
Adobe's upcoming Player certainly appears as the new (and better) iTunes for web video.

More footage on the Adobe Media Player - Craig Barberich demos a preview of the upcoming player at Streaming Media East with a little preview of some of its interactive features. I'm not sure how stuff such as the clickable jacket will be possible without some serious manual intervention or setup but nevertheless this is once again showing us were it's all heading. Way to go Adobe!

Daniel Dura has just posted a video in which Kevin Lynch presents the newly announced Adobe Media Player. I must say it looks sweet and I can't wait to lay my hands on it. Very nice work.

Some of you may remember a recent post of mine which related to the use of FLV Playback on the Akamai network. The challenge was to feed a Netconnection to the component rather than letting the component handle the connection routine itself. Doing so works around a few issues that I also described previously.
I am very happy to be able to distribute this class now after having been granted permission by Akamai (special thanks to Will Law) to do so.
This class won't just come in handy if you use Akamai to stream your flv videos but with some small modifications you can use this as a basis for your own connection routines, for example if you want to pass a contentPath parameter via the query string.

Anyway, here is the class for you to download, make of it what you like :-)

Gerd Hilgemann from Onlinelib.de (the company behind VCS Video Communication Server) has just sent me an update on their latest developments. The Germans were hard at work (who'd expect otherwise) implementing a form of DRM protection to the delivery of flv files. It is described as ACP - anti Caching Protection - and adds a VCS license server to the mix of their existing offerings. This server, so I was told, is able to renew or delete license keys at certain intervals which allows pretty detailed control over who can access a certain video file - Flash Video in this case.
Says Gerd: "ACP writes a watermark ID into the flv during streaming to the client. This ID can only be decrypted via a special decoder by Onlinelib. Through this process, the flv file is also being changed in such a way that it cannot be played back reliably by a normal Player, which means that a digital like-for-like copy is not possible.
Onlinelib have released an intial demo which can be seen here.

I'm currently working on a streaming media player for a client of mine who hosts their content (flv video) on Akamai. When I had to decide which route to take with this player (ie build one from scratch or leverage existing components such as FLVPlayback) I ran a a few tests during which I encountered an issue that some of you may also come across at some point. The issue is related to FLVPlayback.
To explain my problem I need to start a bit further back... In order to circumvent certain connectivity problems with proxy servers (I'll describe these in another post sometime) it is necessary to query a specified address in the Akamai network which returns an XML packet containing the best IP for that particular client to connect to (the IP of your nearest FMS or FCS box basically). Once your rtmp connection to that IP is established you can then start streaming video.

Fabian Topfstedt, a fellow developer, has kindly donated a new player (scrubber.fla) which in combination with Lighty is able to pseudo-stream flv video files as described in this post.

Features:
* Lightweight 54kb swf-player
* Plays an aspect ratio of 4:3 (or everything else letterboxed)
* Shows metadata of video within the contextmenu
* Autoplays videos (via parameter) or wait for user to push the playbutton (default)
* Parameterized bufferlength (default: 3s)
* lighttpd and mod_flv_streaming support

You can download the fla (MX 2004 required) and compiled swf (Player 7 required) here.

Files are released under a
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Maybe you've noticed that there have been some high profile rollouts of Flash Video over the last few weeks including

ABC.com is now streaming full length episodes of their top shows using FMS and On2 video. Apparently they have served over 11 million streams in the first 4 weeks. And that's US only (streams not available outside the US).

NBC/Universal have relaunched their web based video player using Flash, Flash Media Server and On2 video across all of their web properties.

The New York Times is now streaming Flash video from their homepage and in their video archives.

I often hear complaints about the apparent shortcomings of Flash video, how expensive it is to serve compared to say Windows Media and how inferior its featureset is.

While I can understand some of this criticism it seems to me largely related to downloadable content and offline viewing. Granted, Flash video is not an ideal format for that and I don't think it has (yet) claimed to be - maybe this will change come Apollo. What the examples above demonstrate however is that the in-browser experience can be much greater using Flash video. Moreover, it's not so much about the cost per MB streamed, it's about value for money and the richness that Flash video can add to a brand.

From my own experience I can say that clients are both aware of the sometimes higher cost to stream Flash video (a cost which I believe will come down as the platform matures) and also more than happy to pay that price. In return they get cross platform playback, an unrivalled Player ubiquity as well as one of the best user experiences for online video.

What are your thoughts, where is Flash video heading? What's lacking, and where does it excel?

Nothing groundbreaking here, just another little demo slash experiment. Someone recently asked about a full screen Flash Video piece and whether or not it can be done. Sure it can be done but there are problems one of which is: how big is full screen? 800 by 600 maybe? 1024 by 768?

Therefore it's tricky to know to what target size you should encode to. Maybe stick with 640 by 480 and scale up? I don't know the answer but what I can show you is what the result looks like when you encode a nice piece of source material to 640x480 and 800x600 respectively, then blow it up to fullscreen.

Note: resize your browser, then refresh the newly opened page - the player will not resize on the fly.

Sample 1: 640x480 target size
Sample 2: 800x600 target size

Both video data rates were 500kbps, audio 80kbps. The height differs a bit from 480 and 600 respectively as I chose to keep the aspect ratio. This was probably a mistake but shouldn't affect the outcome too much.

Make up your own mind about the results but feel free to share them via the comments link below.

Coming up: another one of my utter unscientific excercises. This time I'm taking a look at how keyframe density during Flash Video encoding affects the output filesize.
As you may know, Flash Video files (.flv) usually consist of loads and loads of frames, comparable to the Flash timeline. This series of frames inside the flv file is made up of some keyframes as well as interframes (the frames in between the keyframes). A keyframe will hold the entire image information for that frame (a fully functional image so to speak) whereas interframes contain only the changes from one frame to the next. This aids compression as only changed data is adding to the weight of interframes.