Geek.blog » Technology

How to Stream and Playback Live Video using Flash Media Server

Andrew Christensen — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:27:54 +0000

Sorry for the lack of instruction or description. I would rather hand off some code that works, rather than no code.

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var cameraPlayback:Video = new Video();
addChild(cameraPlayback);

var camera:Camera = Camera.getCamera();
camera.setQuality(0,100);

var publishStream:NetStream;
var playbackStream:NetStream;

var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, onNetStatus);

var client:Object = {};
client.onBWCheck = function() { }
client.onBWDone = function() { }

nc.client = client;

nc.connect("rtmp://YOUR_FMS_SERVER_URL/live/");

function onNetStatus(e:NetStatusEvent) {

switch(e.info.code) {
case "NetConnection.Connect.Success":
publishStream = new NetStream(nc);
publishStream.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, onNetStatus);
publishStream.attachCamera(camera);
publishStream.publish("myCamera");

playbackStream = new NetStream(nc);
playbackStream.addEventListener(NetStatusEvent.NET_STATUS, onNetStatus);
playbackStream.play("myCamera");

cameraPlayback.attachNetStream(playbackStream);

break;

}
}

Actionscript 3 Marker Helper Class

Andrew Christensen — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 02:04:49 +0000

It’s a pain to try and keep track of item registration points when placing them on the stage. So to help my debug efforts, I create the Marker class. It draws a crosshair where ever you need one. You can use them to keep track of any specific point.

Using the class is dead easy, you just need to add a new instance of the class to the display tree and configure it appropriately.

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import Marker;

// adds a marker that will snap to the center of the stage (even when the stage is resized)
addChild(new Marker(true));

// adds a Marker instance at 50,50 point
addChild(new Marker(50,50));

// adds a Marker instance at 100,100 and sets the Marker's color to 0x00FF00
addChild(new Marker(100,100, 0x00FF00));

Download Marker.as

Droplet: Quick Drop.io Desktop AIR App

Andrew Christensen — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:12:08 +0000

I’m proud to announce the beta release of my first Drop.io desktop AIR application called Droplet. I built the application using my own Drop.io AS3 library. The application is very simple and offers the fastest way to upload a single file to Drop.io. Just open the application, choose your file, and Droplet uploads your file to a generate drop. Once uploaded, you have the option to upload another file (to a brand new drop) or view the drop you just created with your file!

If Droplet gains enough support, I would love to see further renditions of the application to allow more support for other Drop.io features. Until then, be sure to leave your thoughts in a comment below!

Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.

System Requirements:

Adobe AIR Runtime 1.5 or higher
- Will run on Windows, Mac, or Linux

Joshua Davis and Bezier Curve Animations

Andrew Christensen — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:01:09 +0000

I’ve always held Joshua Davis pretty high on my list of inspirational programmers/designers. It seems just as I think he has fallen off the radar, he puts out something like this. Wow, this guy always has a trick up his sleeve…

See his presentation with great examples!

What is a Flash Developer!?

Andrew Christensen — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:49:56 +0000

Lee Brimlow has yet another great writeup, but this time it isn’t another great video tutorial. Instead he finally spelled out his opinion on what makes a Flash Developer, or a Flash Designer and the difference between Flash and Flex.

Check it out!

PhizzPop Minneapolis | Team space150

Andrew Christensen — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:31:57 +0000

So a few guys from work and myself were asked to compete in the Microsoft PhizzPop challenge this week. I had heard of the competition a few months back, but I had thought it was more of a student challenge. After being able to rearrange my work schedule for 3 days of Silverlight training, I was off to the MN Microsoft campus!

The training was taught by Aquent, which was nice to have a neutral party teaching the software. I was actually pretty impressed with the Microsoft Expression Suite. We spent most of the class working in Blend 2 building Silverlight applications. After working in Flash and other web technologies for years, I was happy to notice the similarities Microsoft incorporated into the Expression Suite to help first time users jump right in. My favorite part was the tie between Visual Studio and Blend. Using Visual Studio to edit the C# (main programming language for Silverlight applications) worked great. I never knew Visual Studio was so robust as an editor, I wish I could edit Actionscript in it!

So after 3 days of training, we received our challenge from Microsoft: Pitch an idea to help a fictitious retailer engage more customers online and offline. My team regrouped and over the next 5 days (3 of them business) worked on our pitch. During that time I was the team’s developer. It was my job to build out the technical part of the pitch using Microsoft technologies (Expression Studio mainly). One neat thing to note, everyone in the contest was able to develop for the new Microsoft Surface and Microsoft Airwave technologies. We had access to one of the few Microsoft Surface prototypes to use in our presentations. The scheduling around developing for these technologies was a little too tight, we could only debug on a live machine for a couple hours the day before the contest, so my team decided to stick to desktop development instead. I will admit switching over to a new technology in such a short time then creating an entire business pitch in three days was a pain.

My team pushed late into each night to develop the concept, art, and media files for our final presentation. Finally on Thursday evening, we headed over to Solera in downtown Minneapolis for the PhizzPop event. Microsoft did a great job with the event, lots of lights and drinks (do not try the absinthe!). Each team had 8 minutes (10 tops) to present their pitch to a panel of 5 judges from local business and agencies. My team nailed our presentation, and in the end were one of two favorites. The other was Minneapolis design agency Zeus Jones. After 15 minutes the judges regrouped and announced the winner of the event. After all that hard work and effort over the past two weeks, team space150 (my team) lost to Zeus Jones. I was bummed, but if we had to loose to any of the teams, I was glad it was them.

Overall it was a great experience that brought us together and I can walk away with some great knowledge of this new technology. Going forward I don’t plan using Silverlight all too much, it definately has limited moments of being a better option than Flash for me.

Super Duper Desktop FLV Player added to Softpedia Database!

Andrew Christensen — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:09:35 +0000

I wrote in a previous post about an Adobe AIR Desktop FLV Player that I developed a while back for quick viewing of Adobe FLV files. I’m happy to announce the app has been officially added to the Softpedia database! You can now download the file from either Adobe’s Marketplace or from Softpedia.

Papervision Reality

Andrew Christensen — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:14:20 +0000

Wow, the guys over at Digital Pictures Interactive have pushed the limits of Flash and Papervision to produce an application that reads your webcam image and renders a Papervision model (in this case a Monster) in real time. The application looks for a printed symbol and judges it’s proximity and perspective from comparing it’s edges. I would have been fine with just finding the object within the camera and drawing the model, but these guys take it steps further and actually change it’s scale and pitch depending on how the paper is positioned.

Very well done! Read on to check out the video demo

CHECK IT OUT!

Here is another cool Papervision app I had posted a while back that involves a different Monster!

Flash CS4 Classic Tweens Cause Constant Crashing! UPDATE

Andrew Christensen — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:30:13 +0000

UPDATE: It doesn’t seem to just be the classic tweens. Any type of tween (Classic, Motion, or Shape) that I create causes flash to crash after working with it for a couple of minutes. I’m seeing the crash happen when I’m trying to move frames around on the timeline.

It’s 11:30am and I’ve already had my new copy of Flash CS4 crash on me 5 times. Each crash has been related to a classic tween in some sort of way. Either moving the frames around, or even just creating the tween causes flash to crash.

So far there doesn’t seem to be a method that works besides not using classic tweens.

Anyone else having this problem? Maybe it’s just my system? I’m running XP 64-bit.

UPDATE: Twitter AIR App of Choice: Twhirl

Andrew Christensen — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:56:00 +0000

UPDATE: After dealing with a couple bugs and missing features (clickable links), I switch over to Twhirl for my Twitter AIR app. I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now and it is fantastic!

I’ve been using the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox to do most all of my twitters, but I just stumbled upon a GREAT AIR app that offers far more features. It’s called TweetDeck. I’ve only been using it a very short while, but have high hopes for this beta. Be sure to grab a copy and give it a go!

Papervision and Geocoding

Andrew Christensen — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:50:22 +0000

The June 2008 edition of Adobe EDGE has a great article on geocoding. Geocoding is getting popular with the release of Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, and Google Maps APIs. Suddenly any user can apply for one of those keys and start mapping locations on their site or even using those APIs to get geo location data to then use within their own mapping engine. That is where this example comes in. Adobe has written up a great article on getting started with using the Yahoo Maps API to get the longitude and latitude of a location, then converting that to 3D coordinates to place on a globe built in Papervision. The example is simple, but feels good and responsive.

Read the article
View the Demo

A couple more Flash Geocoding Examples and Demos

Yahoo News Globe
Spinny Globe
Senocular 3D Globe (Flash Player 10)
FreeEarth (Javascript)

Super Duper Desktop FLV Player for Adobe AIR

Andrew Christensen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:01:10 +0000

I had started creating AIR apps since the first beta release and I love how easy it is to create a simple customized tool quickly to help with day to day activities. Until now I’ve been using the WimpyFLV Player with limited success. It was ok, but would have issues playing back files on the network. So I developed my own player that is simple and straight to the point. For development purposes I have the dimensions of the video file in the upper right hand corner and the length of the video in seconds. This helps since you can’t just view the properties of an FLV to get this information. Check out the link below to download the .air file.

Adobe – Adobe AIR Marketplace Photo & Video

Flash Player 10 Fabric Demo

Andrew Christensen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:38:36 +0000

Justin Everett-Church, Senior Adobe Flash Player Product Manager, just posted a new demo showing off Flash Player 10’s new 3D capabilities. It’s a fabric demo that uses APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) to simulate the physics. This demo may look familiar to a previous papervision demo (which no longer seems to be live, sorry).

Justin’s Flash Blog

File Furnace app added to Softpedia!

Andrew Christensen — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:25:30 +0000

An Adobe Air app that I created a while back seems to have been added to the software site Softpedia and deemed 100% clean!

Download File Furnace 1.0 – Permanently deletes files and directories you drag onto its main window – Softpedia

20 jQuery Plugins for Unforgettable User Experience

Andrew Christensen — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:06:22 +0000

Javascript is getting more and more powerful, just check out some of these neat demos. Carful javascripters, a browser can only handle so much javascript at once. Flash and Javascript have a time and a place, remember that.

» 20 jQuery Plugins for Unforgettable User Experience