Category Archives: Flash Media Server

Rundown of the MAX News

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The press releases just crossed the wire and we have a ton of news coming out of MAX. Plus more surprises in store for tomorrow. For those of you not here you can still check the keynotes out. I’m hosting the online side of the MAX keynotes and we’re doing some fun stuff before and after the keynotes to give you a sense of what’s going on at MAX. As you can tell from the rundown, there’s some fun stuff today.

Flash Platform Runtimes

We’ve been saying all year that Flash on mobile devices is a push this year and we’ve made a lot of progress. Today at the keynotes we’re going to be showing off Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones. This is the version of the Flash Player that we’ve been working on so hard this year. We’ve been working with some great partners including Nvidia and ARM to optimize the player for those devices and create a quality mobile experience.

Possibly more important is that the number of companies committed to the Open Screen Project continues to grow. Today we announced that RIM is joining the Open Screen Project, which means that Blackberry will be supporting Flash Player 10.1. Google is also on board. We’ll have public versions of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm, and Windows Mobile later this year with Google Android and Symbian following shortly. Developers will have mobile bits in their hands soon.

We also announced AIR 2.0, which is going to give Flash developers a lot more native hooks into the operating system. A lot of the developers I talked to wanted it and so that’s what the team did. Mike Chambers talked about some of these features at Flash on the Beach. Another cool feature of AIR 2.0 is the ability to record from the microphone without going to a server. getMicrophone can now be a reality

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Tools

We also have public betas of both Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst that are available today. I’ve been really impressed with how far Flash Catalyst in particular has come from Beta 1 to Beta 2. It’s a lot more polished, has more functionality (including video) and feels a lot more fun to use. If you checked out Beta 1 and found it lacking, you should check out Beta 2. We’ve also made big progress on Flash Builder and I’ve been a very happy camper using the tool full-time.

Servers

Some very cool stuff is also happening on the server side. We’ve released ColdFusion 9, a spectacular release with some great features including the ability for you to consume ColdFusion as a service from inside of your Flex application without writing ColdFusion code. I’ve also been playing with the LiveCycle Data Services release and its modeler plug-in for Flash Builder. The team has focused on model-driven development making it easy to generate and create a model, and then link that model directly to your Flex application. It helps by generating all of the assemblers and you can directly modify the user interface just by changing the model.

Finally we’ve got some Flash Media Server news. We’re adding support for HTTP streaming, which will include support for content protection. We also have released the Collaboration side of Flash Platform Services and announced pricing so you can jump in and start adding collaboration to your application.

If you guys have any questions (sorry I don’t have more fleshed out info, it’s a lot of news), feel free to drop me an email – ryan@adobe.com and I’ll try and answer what I know.

Two New Open Source Projects at Adobe

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Today we’re announcing two more projects going up on opensource.adobe.com and becoming part of the open source family at Adobe. The first is the Text Layout Framework, which comes from some of the advancements we made in Flash Player 10 to improve text support in Flash Player. The other is the Open Source Media Framework, which was known by the codename “Strobe” and provides a robust framework for media playback of any kind (video, audio, dynamic SWFs).

The Text Layout Framework (TLF) is something that’s going to be a huge boon to developers. If you’ve been working with text in the new Flex 4 components then you’ve been working with the Text Layout Framework. If you haven’t seen the demo you can check it out over on Labs. It was created by a group that is just a few blocks north of me and does a great job of showing off the features of the new TLF. Now that the Text Layout Framework is open source you can push, pull, and extend it to your heart’s content. A great example of this in action is the New York Times Reader and the Boston Globe Reader – both of which wouldn’t have been possible without the Text Layout Framework.

The other project we’re releasing is the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). I’ve been digging into the documentation a bit and I’m excited about what this means for rich media and the Flash Platform. The OSMF includes hooks for any kind of media type the Flash Player supports including images, audio, SWF content, and of course video. Using the framework you can create your own media players and the OSMF provides a set of powerful baseline functionality. It has hooks for creating your own plug-ins for metrics, advertising, and other functions. It has support for both progressive download and streaming built in as well as all of the video controls and functionality. And there isn’t any UI associated with the OSMF so you can integrate it into your application however you want.

I encourage you to download the source code and check out the samples. There are some good examples that show how to go about building plugins, how to use the composite media features (so you can support a number of different media types in one player), and how to build UI components on top of the framework.

Building a P2P Chat Application with Adobe Stratus

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Adobe Stratus is a hosted beta service that uses new RTMFP functionality in Flash Player 10 to connect directly instead of having to round trip between the server and the instance of the player. I chatted with Laurel Reitman and Jozsef Vass about the benefits of RTMFP and Stratus. At the end I demo how to create a very simple chat program using Stratus.

Watch the Masters Tournament Live with Flash Media Server

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I’ll be honest. I think golf is for sissies and for me the Masters is just a few days where ESPN.com is cluttered with stuff I don’t care about. But some people really love their Masters Tournament, and if you’re going to watch it, you might as well enjoy it live in HD right in your browser. Both Masters.com and CBSSports.com have live coverage courtesy of Flash Media Server. CBSSports.com gives you a low and high connection option while Masters.com has it in full HD glory.

Obama’s Online Town Hall in Flash

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President Obama is holding an interactive online town hall where he’s taking questions from anyone and then streaming the event live. To do that, Flash Media Server 3.5, which includes dynamic streaming so you get the best picture quality your connection can handle.

In other Flash Platform and FMS news, MLB is rolling out their next generation live player in HD and built with Flash. As Serge said, Flash on!

Akamai on Dynamic Streaming

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Andy Plesser has a good interview up with Mike Afergan, an SVP at Akamai in which he talks about the benefits of dynamic streaming, which is part of the latest version of Flash Media Server. Video delivery is an area that I think still has a ton of room for innovation and as I’ve talked to the folks in our FMS group, I’m excited by what they’ve got cooking.

We talked about RTMFP, which we added to Flash Player 10. RTMFP opens up the possibility of creating P2P services in the future with FMS. Once the clients “check in” with FMS, they’ll be able to stream content directly to each other. This should help with quality for live or heavy-traffic events because everyone can share content and bandwidth. We’ve actually got a cloud-hosted service codenamed “Stratus” that will let you try out the technology right now using Adobe’s infrastructure. You can sign up for a developer key on Adobe Labs.

Flash Media Server 3 at the IBC Conference

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Flash Media Server 3 LogoBig press day today around Flash Media Server 3 and Adobe Media Player (AMP). Let’s first step back. IBC is a big media conference with the tagline “the world of content – creation, management, delivery”. Adobe obviously has a lot of ways to do all three of those things with content. The primary takeaway for me in reading some of our internal material and the press releases is that we’re starting to tell a consistent story around our media offerings. Basically we’ve got a lot of great tools; Flash, Premier, Audition, After Effects, and Soundbooth that let you create cool content. We’ve also got a couple of great ways for people to consume that content; the Flash Player and Flash Lite 3. Finally we’re working to empower the delivery of that content with Flash Media Server. From what I can tell we’re starting to make the workflow seamless between all of these tools and technologies. Hopefully that’s good for anyone touching rich media content.

The biggest announcement (aside from the Cisco partnership which I’m still researching) seems to be the Flash Media Server 3 push. I didn’t see a lot of new news, but there’s a FAQ that might be new. I know a lot of people here commented on the requirement that you have FMS3 to stream H.264 content. I’m still trying to get more information about that. We also announced some partners for AMP but I don’t know how many of these are new. I think the Akamai support is new and is kind of cool.

JD has more thoughts.

[tags]Flash Media Server, Adobe Platform, Rich Media[/tags]