FlashComGuru.com - The Original Flash Video, Flash Media Server and Flash Platform Resource

Screen Sharing Now Available in Flash - With LCCS

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:55:00 --0100

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry, but as you've probably heard already it is now possible to incorporate screensharing functionality into your Flash and Flex based applications. This is pretty huge considering that developers have been asking for this feature for the best part of 10 year, but it's also a slight disappointment to see this feature tied to LiveCycle Collaboration Service (LCCS) and not as an inherent Flash Player feature which can be leveraged with other technologies such as Flash Media Server. All things considered though it is a step in the right direction. Will we see screensharing become usable with FMS one day? I'm not too sure... [More]

Flash Camp Birmingham, 7th September 2010 - Are You Coming?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:12:00 --0100

UPDATE - FlashCamp Birmingham has now been postponed until March 2011

There's less than 2 weeks to go to Flash Camp Birmingham, right in the heart of sunny England. Ok, it may not be sunny but that's just one more reason to spend a day at the Birmingham Library Theatre. In case you have been thinking about attending I recommend you sign up right now and grab one of the FREE (yes free!) tickets and catch some of the great sessions by Seb-Lee Delisle, Niqui Merrett, Steve Carpenter and other well known figures.

Yours truly will be attending and I'm very much looking forward to catching up with old and new friends alike. Flash Camp Birmingham - Miss it at your peril. Register now.

Funciton AS3 Library for FMS (Clientside Load Balancing)

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:59:00 --0100

Fernando Florez has just shared some interesting classes for FMS on the Flash Media List. SThey are handy if you want to load balance FMS connections on the client side. Why would you do that? It's cheaper than doing it serverside and also you have more control to switch servers for new connected clients on the fly without restarts, let you work with different providers, etc.

Here's some sample code: import funciton.models.UpstreamServer; import funciton.utils.DateUtils; import funciton.net.BaseConnector; import funciton.utils.PendingCall; var upstream1:UpstreamServer = new UpstreamServer("myhost1", "myDemoApp", 1935, "rtmp"); var upstream2:UpstreamServer = new UpstreamServer("myhost2", "myDemoApp", 443, "rtmps"); // box with security certificate upstream2.down = true; // it is down for maintenance var upstream3:UpstreamServer = new UpstreamServer("myhostAtOutsourceCompany", "myDemoApp", 1935, "rtmp"); upstream3.max_fails = 3; // if it fails for more than 3 times disable it from the pool upstream3.expires = DateUtils.HOUR_IN_MS; // if it reaches max_fails re-enable it on the pool after an hour upstream3.backup = true; // it's a backup server. Use it only if upstream1 fails var baseConnector:BaseConnector = new BaseConnector(); var ncHandler:PendingCall = baseConnector.connect(new Vector([upstream1, upstream2, upstream3]); ncHandler.onResult = function(nc:NetConnection):void{ trace ("connection ok"); } ncHandler.onFault = function():void{ trace ("connection failed"); }

BaseConnector class will do all the pool handling/logic. The first successful connection is kept and the rest are closed / discarded. With upstreams declared you can implement round robin or client hash logic easily.

The code is on github and can be found here: http://github.com/funciton/funciton-aslib

Thanks Fernando, great stuff.

Cheap Mobile Broadband When Visiting Germany

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:05:00 --0100

I've recently traveled around France and Germany with my family and needed to get online cheaply whilst there - yes, the idea of 'switching off' is nice in theory but if you have paying customers who aren't pleased when a server goes down then you know the importance of being online to least check your email. As you probably know, roaming charges for data are charged (for no apparent reason tbh) at ridiculous rates, mine being £3 per MB via my provider which is O2. If you know me then you'll know that I'm no fan of being ripped off so I looked for a cheaper solution - read on for more info.

We had free WIFI at our accommodation in France but since my father (with whom we stayed in Germany) neither has a landline nor a mobile broadband tariff ('Interweb? What do I need that for') I had to find another solution - and I quickly found one (but read on to the end for an even cheaper one). [More]

FMS User Group: Adobe Flash Access - Your Questions Answered

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:00:00 --0100

We have another FMS User Group Event coming up on August 19th. This time the topic will be Flash Access, 'a robust content protection and monetization solution that lets content owners, distributors, and advertisers realize new sources of revenue by providing seamless access to premium content. Sounds straight-forward enough, but have you ever wanted to ask the Product Manager specific, pointed questions to get answers that you can apply to your use case? Well, now is your chance to do exactly that.'

Join Florian Pestoni, Principal Product Manager at Adobe, on the August 19th meeting of the FMSUG (http://fms.groups.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=post.display&postid=29673) for an in-depth Q&A session on Flash Access, the next-generation content protection and monetization system for streaming and download of premium video.

Do you have technical, roadmap, or licensing questions? This is your chance to ask! Please submit your questions to Josh Lucero (josh@realeyes.com) by TODAY Thursday, August 12th -- we may not be able to answer all questions, but we'll try to cover as much ground as possible.

You can find more information about Flash Access on the product page (http://adobe.com/products/flashaccess) as well as online documentation (http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashaccess).

Times by Time Zone:
Eastern Time - 12:00 Noon
Central Time- 11:00am
Mountain Time- 10:00am
Pacific Time- 9:00am

Hardening Guide for Flash Media Server

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:36:00 --0100

Asa Whillock has posted a great article on Adobe's Developer Center titled 'Hardening Guide for Flash Media Server'. In it he covers 'ways to prevent your FMS from being used for unintended purposes, as well as understand how to disable features you don't need and gain insights about some things you may not have known about your server.'

This is a must read for everyone who deals with FMS.

Migrating StyleManager.getStyleDeclaration (Flex 3) to IStyleManager2.getStyleDeclaration (Flex 4)

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:08:00 --0100

Today I was working on a Flex 3 application which I now want to compile using the Flex 4 SDK. One of the warnings that cropped up in the Flash Builder Problems panel was the following message:
3608: 'getStyleDeclaration' has been deprecated since 4.0. Please use 'IStyleManager2.getStyleDeclaration on a style manager instance'.

The line in question was the following which applies a global theme color after a color value has been loaded from a remote data source::
StyleManager.getStyleDeclaration('global').setStyle('themeColor', '0x'+gradient_to);

It took me some time to figure out what the heck the 'use IStyleManager2.getStyleDeclaration on a style manager instance' actually meant... it was by no means a straight forward warning. After some Googling and trial and error I came up with this which seems to do the job:
var cssDeclaration:CSSStyleDeclaration = FlexGlobals.topLevelApplication.styleManager.getStyleDeclaration('global'); cssDeclaration.setStyle('themeColor', '0x'+gradient_to);

I'm not sure if this is the correct and/or best way to achieve the same thing but it appears to work which generally is good enough for my requirements :-)
Hope this helps someone, please leave feedback and corrections where applicable.

YouTube: 'Flash Platform Is Best For Video Distribution'

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:56:00 --0100

John Harding, Software Engineer at Google, has posted a lengthy article about the pros and cons of Flash video and HTML5 video support in today's browsers. It's fair to say that the post is in essence a major thumbs up to the Flash Platform. The author points out that video on the web today is much more than a simple video tag pointed at a file, but involves other considerations such as widely supported codecs, secure delivery mechanisms where required by content owners, two way video and audio for recording live via webcam as well as immersive fullscreen options.
All this is of course supported today via the Flash Player but not via HTML5, and whilst we all agree that it'd be very nice not to have to wrap a video into a SWF wrapper we must also face the reality that in many cases a simple click and play experience just doesn't cut it anymore. HTML5's video capabilities could have given Flash a run for its money about 10 years ago when Flash first started building momentum for online video delivery, but they are no match for the type of features that web users today are accustomed to and demand as standard.

Sure, of course I am biased, but I am also smart enough to know when I'm beating a dead horse, and Flash definitely is not one of those. Whilst new technologies such as HTML5 are most welcome, especially when they make a developer's life easier they also need to make sure that they don't over-promise and under-deliver. The amount of hype some companies have been able to generate around HTML5 is almost unreal, yet the follow-up on that hype remains to be seen. In the meantime I'll get back to work to make bling with Flash, clients are waiting and the biggest app store of all is still the web ;-)

How did I get here? Sorry - here's the YouTube blog post again.

Downgrading Apple iPhone OS 4.0 to 3.1.3

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:01:00 --0100

I've had major performance issues on my iPhone 3G (which is over 2 years old) after upgrading to the new iOS 4.0. Apps took much longer to launch, password entry forms did not respond quickly enough and the whole experience was just much much worse than using the 3.1.3 firmware version. Unfortunately I quickly found out that Apple does not like you to downgrade the OS and firmware for reasons that are only known to them, regardless of the fact that the new OS clearly does not perform well on a 3G model.
I tried the 'normal' downgrade process using iTunes 9.2, a 3.1.3 firmware file which I downloaded from this site and entering the phone into DFU mode as described in various guides. However at the end of the restore process I always got Error 1015 which basically translates to 'Nice try my boy'.

Fortunately after unsuccessfully trying a few different approaches I came across this guide which uses the iRecovery tool after Error 1015 has manifested itself and this worked a treat. I managed to downgrade to 3.1.3 without issues following the steps described. So if you too are stuck at Error 1015 then give that guide a try - but you do so at your own risk of course.

Hope this helps someone.

Flex Whiteboard Component Now Available For Wowza (and FMS and RED5)

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:00:00 --0100

I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of our Flex Whiteboard Component for Wowza Media Server. Darren did a terrific job of porting our existing Red5 version (which in turn is based on the FMS version), and it turned out that only minimal client side changes were necessary.
The whiteboard component for Wowza is priced in the same way as the other two versions for FMS and Red5: $499 for the component version (.swc), with an optional source code license priced at $3,000.00 (most users won't need the source version since the component has an extensive API).

To purchase the component please use the form on the product page, drop me an email with any questions, or leave a comment below.

New Wins For Wowza

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 11:47:00 --0100

More evidence that Adobe needs to step up their game with FMS as the ever popular Wowza Media Server announces several new developments. Not only did they manage to sign up LifeSize Communications, a division of Logitech, who have licensed Wowza Media Server 2 software to support the delivery of streaming video via their LifeSize Video Center.
They also announced that Netromedia have partnered with Wowza "to provide customers with unmatched freedom for streaming live and on-demand content to online audiences on any screen."

Wowza is stepping up the pressure with a media server offering that is undoubtedly very flexible both in terms of ingestion protocol support as well as platform reach with being able to stream not only to Flash Player but also to iDevices, Silverlight, Quicktime and more.

Disclosure: both Wowza and Netromedia are advertising partners of this blog

Securing Remoting Access To ColdFusion CFCs From Flex

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:01:00 --0100

Today I was working on a Flex application which uses a lot of Remoting calls to a bunch of ColdFusion CFC methods. I wondered what the most efficient way of securing these methods would be since they are effectively wide open to the world as they all (have to) specify access="remote". This means that anyone with a web browser can invoke the methods and they will even return nice error messages when certain parameters are missing.
One way of restricting access would be to run all Remoting calls through an intermediate page or CFC which handles authentication and access control and which in turn invokes the (now private) CFC methods. I found this a bit cumbersome and I also knew that there was a better way - I remembered the setCredentials method back from the AS2 days. You can see this described in greater detail by Brandon Purcell in his MAX session Securing Applications from 2003(!), but unfortunately it is not directly usabel in today's Flex world.

While Brandon's example is great, and Ray Camden also has some details to add, neither example had all the pieces I needed, particularly an example of not just authenticating a Flex application properly with a CFC but also how to log out again (and to jump ahead, simply running a cflogout tag did not work...).

[More]

Strobe Media Playback Presentation

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:52:00 --0100

There's a live online presentation about the new Strobe Media Playback player coming up tomorrow at the OSMF user group. Ovidiu Eftimie from Adobe's Strobe Media Playback team will be presenting the features of this new versatile "ready-to-go" video player. There'll be an insight into the roadmap for future additions to the player, and time to ask questions.

The presentation starts at 12:00 (West Coast), 20:00 (London), and can be accessed by anyone through this URL http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/osmf

You can find out more about Strobe Media Playback at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/strobemedia

Creating A GMail Filter For Unread Emails

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:23:00 --0100

UPDATE
Hmm so after using this filter for a few days it now appears that whilst it catches all email already in your inbox it does not apply the same filter to newly received messages. This makes this entire tip pretty useless... I'll keep looking for a solution to this but for the time being I don't recommend you use the filter described below. If you have any tips please leave a comment.

If you are like me you may be using Google Apps (or GMail) in combination with an IMAP enabled email client such as Mail or Outlook. Recently I noticed that I was missing some emails which were not caught by any of my filters: in a nutshell, I filter emails for each domain I want to receive email for by applying a label which then shows up as an IMAP folder in OSX Mail. However some senders, particularly bulk emails such as newsletters, specify the 'to' address as either undisclosed or even as the sender address rather than the actual recipient's email address (in this case that'd be mine) which in turn causes the emails to sit in my inbox amongst thousands of other emails where I may miss them.
I thought it would be easy to simply create a new label for unread emails in GMail but unfortunately the label 'unread' is reserved by Google (it did not use to be). You can of course also run a search for unread emails but that does not give you the ability to automatically label the matching messages. To workaround this you can do the following:
1) create a new label such as '_unread'
2) create a new filter with the criteria of 'label:unread' in the 'Has the words:' field
3) Test the filter: all your unread emails should show up
4) click 'Next Step' and ignore the warning
5) apply the label you created in step 1

You should now have a new folder in your email client that shows you all unread emails in GMail. One thing to note is that your local folder may also show any corresponding read messages which are tied to the same conversation as an unread message.

OSMF 1.0 Is Here

Fri, 28 May 2010 13:53:00 --0100

The Open Source Media Framework has today reached 1.0 status. If you're like me and have been holding back on using OSMF until it is out of beta then now would be a good time to dive in and start getting familiar with it.
As you probably know, OSMF is a standardised foundation on which developers can build fully featured media players (not just for video playback) that encompass pretty much every aspect of delivery the Flash Platform has to offer be it dynamic streaming, live and on-demand content, image slideshowsn audio players and much much more. Some of the video components in the newly released Flash Builder product are also based on OSMF, and ship complete with source code.

Go check out OSMF and have a play.