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

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

Mark your calenders! Adobe will be announcing future release information for the new CS4 suite September 23rd. There is a special web broadcast that you can sign up to watch.

The Flash Blog » Adobe will announce CS4 on September 23rd!

RTMP is the protocol used by Adobe’s Flash Media Server to stream content into flash. Most of the help documentation doesn’t touch much on this method of connection and is limited to sources not easily available to users.

This article should be used by those with an understanding of video playback using actionscript 3. If that isn’t you, please read this article before continuing.

1.) In order to use the RTMP protocol, you will need to install and run a version of Adobe Flash Media Server. Adobe has released a free developer version the limits you to 10 connections. That will be MORE than enough to do some basic development. Please make sure you are running or have access to a Flash Media Server before continuing to the next step.

1.) (B) If you are having trouble installing or setting up an app, please read this article.

2.) Now that you have access to a Flash Media Server, we will start with some basic code that should look familiar if you have worked with actionscript and video before. For this step, you will need to know the URI for the server. If you installed Flash Media server on the machine you are running on, you can use “localhost” for the URI. We will be using the “vod” app that comes pre-installed on the server for this example.

var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc.connect("rtmp://YOUR_SERVER_URI/vod/");

If we were loading an flv file without streaming, you would have passed null to the connect() method instead.

3.) The only thing left is to load the stream, instead of loading an FLV video from a URL. This is actually much easier than you think. Instead of passing a URLRequest to the NetStream.play() method, you would instead pass the name of the stream you wish to play from within your app (this is the name of the FLV file on the server, but without the .FLV extension). To playback an HD streaming file, you will need to format your stream name slightly different: “mp4:NAME_OF_STREAM.mp4″

• Please note that you can not setup your NetStream until after the NetConnection has successfully connected. You will know this from the NetStatus event: NetConnection.Connect.Success that is dispatched.

var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(nc);
ns.play("NAME_OF_STREAM");
// ns.play("mp4:NAME_OF_STREAM.mp4");  // this will stream an HD movie instead.

4.) That’s it! I hope this article has helped. Please comment below with any questions and I would be glad to help answer them.

For a more informative tutorial, check out this one from Peachpit.

I could write up an example for how to use this new functionality, but it would turn out just like the one Adobe wrote up in the FMS documentation.

Flash Media Server Bandwidth Checking

A very important part of streaming any type of media is the bandwidth. You want to stream the best quality possible, but keep the stream constant. This can be a very tricky thing since all your users will most likely not be at the same connection speeds. Adobe has a great article on the math behind calculating different kinds of bandwidth for one-to-many (video on demand) setups and many-to-many (video conference) setups.

[ via Adobe FMS Dev Center ]

Tinic Uro has a SPECTACULAR (long!) write up with everything you will need to know.

It’s finally here! I have yet to really dig into it, but Google claims it does everything the Javascript version does.

Google Maps API for Flash

I had a hard time finding a simple intro to using the NativeMenu, so here is some code for a basic Hello World NativeMenu demo.

import flash.display.*;
import flash.desktop.*;

stage.nativeWindow.menu = new NativeMenu();

var menuItem:NativeMenuItem = new NativeMenuItem("Hello!");

var subMenu:NativeMenu = new NativeMenu();
var btn1:NativeMenuItem = new NativeMenuItem("World");
btn1.addEventListener(Event.SELECT, itemClicked);
subMenu.addItem(btn1);
menuItem.submenu = subMenu;

stage.nativeWindow.menu.addItem(menuItem);

function itemClicked(e) {
   trace("You Selected: ", e.target);
}

Source

Adobe takes it a step further and launches the Open Screen Project

“The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes.”

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

[ via BigSpaceship ]

More and more I need a framerate display for a flash project I’m working on. The guys over at Squidder have put together the perfect tool for doing just this. Get the source from Google Code.

UPDATE: Check out this even better AS3 FPS tool that is more informative and still simple to use.