OSMF includes a robust plug-in architecture that lets developers extend it and add features. The OSMF team has put together a marketplace for tutorials, white papers, and plug-ins for OSMF. It looks like it’s a great resource for all things OSMF and a bunch of the Flash media rockstars have already contributed content. The guys at Realeyes Media have put up an example plugin that lets you track analytics when using OSMF. Almer/Blank has a reference card that covers the important parts of OSMF. And Jodie O’Rourke has a getting started article for an introductory look at OSMF.

I think it’s a cool way to expose a bunch of developer-related content. If you’re knowledgeable about OSMF, definitely think about contributing some content. And if you’re just wanting to show video, take a look at some of the plug-ins and documents that make it easy. And everyone should check out the StageVideo Plugin for using StageVideo with OSMF.

You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature. For more details about it, Tinic already posted about this.

Some of you may remember talk of a Flash Player “Gala” that was put out as a beta right before Flash Player 10.1 was released. The GPU decoding didn’t make it into the 10.1 release so we had to wait for a security release to add it. That security release is here and it should make quite a bit of difference for Mac users who are playing H.264 video through Flash Player.

My colleague, Jens Loeffler has a great writeup on the app and the experience. It’s all powered by the Flash Platform and Flash Media Server. You get multiple audio channels (so you can listen in Spanish, which I think is the best way to listen to goals being scored) as well as picture-in-picture and real time highlights that appear along the timeline so you can go back and see the cool moments. It’s a really great showcase of Flash and how the whole platform comes together to provide an excellent viewing experience.

Flash on soccer fans!

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.

Some of the cool technical stuff is that the digital living room player is smart enough to offload the graphical processing to chips inside of the TV that are specifically meant to handle high definition video so the footprint of the player itself is smaller and you’re not trying to push a bunch of HD video through the software.

Kevin Towes has a great writeup on the changes. The important part for developers:

The specification documents how the RTMP protocol works, this will enable you to send and receive data from Flash Player or AIR. You can learn how to use the RTMP handshake, understand how the RTMP Chunk stream is formed, how RTMP command messages are created and the message formats. This information will let you leverage the client side ActionScript classes, NetConnection , NetStream, SharedObject and others that today move data back and forth between Flash Player and Flash Media Server.

There are a couple of things that aren’t included in the spec. As most of you may know, we’ve been evolving both Flash Media Server and RMTP over the past couple of years and have created specific protocols based on it to enable our partners to do things like protect digital content. Those include, for example, RTMPe for encrypting RTMP streams and RTMFP (the real time media flow protocol) for doing P2P communication between Flash Players.

While it took us longer than I would have liked, this is still very significant for our developer community and the wider Flash ecosystem. With the AMF, FLV, F4V and RTMP specifications now open developers have a published set of rules that will let them better integrate SWF applications into their backend systems and architecture. These two specs are the keys to communicating with the Flash Player and I hope this shows that we continue to try to make the Flash Player as transparent as possible even if we aren’t open sourcing it. It’s also important to note that you’re allowed to expand on the RTMP spec and create unique implementations for your own needs.

The denizens of Hollywood and Silicon Valley have, by and large, vastly different value systems, role models, even tastes in cars, food and clothing.

But they increasingly agree on one thing: a standard for online video called Adobe Flash.

As Flash video continues to take off it means more opportunities for Flash developers. At Web09 and in a lot of the customer visits I’ve been in here in New Zealand, people want their content to be multi-screen and we want that to mean more than just mobile devices. We want you to be able to put your Flash content anywhere.

There are going to be a bunch of fun announcements coming up between NAB and FiTC, so stay tuned. There will be a lot of Flash goodness in the next couple of weeks.

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!

Even now I think video is still seen as a “black box” medium. You see sites like YouTube and it’s mostly about consuming a video clip and moving on. There are a ton of examples on sites like The FWA that show how video can be just another piece of an overall experience which blends seamlessly into other interactive elements of an application or showcase. I want to see more developers start to treat video like another tool in their toolbox when it comes to creating the ultimate application. Hopefully that starts to happen more as people move away from the passive relationship of watching TV in the living room and start to demand that video be as active as the rest of their web applications.