Wowza Media Server has just been updated to 3.0.4, if you are running anything below that then I recommend going to pick up the latest as there are a lot of fixes and improvements and enhancements going on. I don’t think the Wowza guys ever rest.. Nice job!
Go grab the update here.
Release notes are here
Hey Everybody, I thought I would write up a few things to wrap 2011 and get on with 2012 here at FMSGuru.com and Solid Thinking Interactive.
First up, thank you everybody for the visits, compliments, comments and sometimes work that you have brought when coming to check out what we have here. Product sales have improved year after year (so have the products I think) and there are tons of requests for mods and new products altogether. I can tell you that we are working as hard as we can in that area and more. Every little bit and piece that improves this small niche community is really important, so once again, thank you very much.
2011 saw a total of 34 new free video tutorials. That’s pretty good at 2.8 per month! Just under one per week essentially.. I plan on improving on that this year for sure. There is so much information to be put out as both Flash Media Server and Wowza Media Server are growing all the time and new techniques get figured out on almost a daily basis.
Just in case you missed the last two tutorials of the year, I managed to get one out on both servers:
Overriding the play() method server side to limit play time with Wowza
Developing server side code on FMS to check if a live stream is available
2011 brought a brand new website too. We’re going into the 4th year for FMSGuru.com and it was about time a facelift happened. In conjunction we also released a new product, STi Video Recorder for Wowza Media Server HD Edition v3 , a very cool video recording application that works on Wowza. With those out of the way we can definitely concentrate on more free video tutorials, articles and of course product updates and new products altogether. We have a lot of ideas and a lot of requests coming in on almost a daily basis. We listen to them all so please don’t hesitate to ask if we have done or can do something. We probably have done it or are going to!
2012 is going to bring all kinds of new tutorials, articles, product updates and products. I fully expect the community to grow as the demand for this particular technology continues to grow out of control, there has never been a better time to be involved in live media/communication and streaming video. It’s amazing.
So stay tuned for some more updates soon!
Thanks again,
Graeme
There are two new tutorials up on FMSGuru.com, one on Wowza Media Server and one on Flash Media Server:
In this tutorial we talk about using the play() method on the server side in Wowza to limit how long a client can play a stream. This is more powerful than doing it client side because you have full control from a security standpoint in that a malicious SWF also can not play the stream longer than you specifiy in the server side code. Wowza Media Server provides a lot of options with security and control over the end user’s experience, this is just one of many techniques to take advantage of to make sure your apps stay secure and doing what you want. Keep in mind the concept explained is basic but there are a lot of options from here.
In this tutorial we cover making an application that will allow you to check to see if a live stream is available before trying to play it. This tutorial requires Flash Media Interactive or developer versions as we will be taking advantage of some server side coding to get the job done. The concept in this tutorial can be applied in many ways but essentially we are going to ask the server if a live stream is available, if it isn’t then a warning is shown. The server side coding will also be setup to automatically keep track of live streams as they are published and unpublished. Client side is AS3 in Flex.
A quick post to those that are using FMS, the latest update 4.5.1 is out now, check that out here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/flashmediaserver/downloads_updaters.html
Release notes for that are here (PDF) but to summarize they’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, most seemingly important of correcting issues where 24×7 streaming to HDS or HLS wasn’t working right. That’s good, I’ve seen lots of posts about that kind of thing, core rollover and all that. RTMPE has been improved for protection of RTMP streams, you’ll need the last flash player for that.
All in all, some good improvements and should stabilize a few other items and features of the software. Go grab it and be careful when updating as you have to manually put back your values in your XML files etc. Keep a backup of all files. I cover some of that stuff in one of my latest tutorials on FMSGuru.com actually:
Installation and the Basics of Flash Media Server 4.5