Sti Media: The Source

Ask an FMS Guru #32: I'm having trouble viewing streamed video, how can I confirm the server is working?

I actually receive and see this one on forums quite a bit so let's see if I can shed a bit of light on things.

The question: I'm having trouble viewing streamed video, how can I confirm the server is working?

The answer:

First thing to do here is supply a link to a previous article I wrote on this subject:
http://www.sti-media.com/blog/archives/000217.html

So that's how you would setup the server for the FLV file.

For the flash side, let's cover the basics.

1. Open a new FLA file (flash 7 and up)
2. Go to the library and click the menu button and choose "New Video"
3. Choose "Video actionscript controlled"
4. Once the video object is on the stage, select it and put in an instance name of "vid" for now.

From this point forward I'll just post some quick actionscript to test if video will play from a server. We'll use the video file "myVideo.flv". So just substitute that in the code for whatever you are using. (sorry about the code unfriendly blog here..)

//create a netConnection
var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
//create the net stream to play the video
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(nc);
//attach the net stream to the video object
vid.attachVideo(ns);
//handle the information objects from the net connection
nc.onStatus = function(info){
if(info.code == "NetConnection.Connect.Success"){
//connection success, play the stream
playTheStream();
}
}

//function to play the stream
function playTheStream(){
//0 is for a prerecorded stream, -1 is to play it until it ends
ns.play("myVideo", 0, -1);
}

nc.connect("rtmp://MYSERVER/videoApplication/videoplayer");

That's pretty much it. If your video does not play in the screen when you publish that file and you are connecting up successfully then you don't have the video file in the right spot. Double check that.

If you can't connect up then double check the connection string to see if you have the right server, right application and actually check to make sure the server is running and the ports are open that you have set for the server.

That's all folks.

On that note, I will be moving forward with the video tutorials. I even have a brand new domain for them and will post more information on that in the very near future. If anybody can guess that domain I shall send you a big delicious chocolate chip cookie :)

Ask an FMS Guru #31: How can I move FLV files that have been recorded with Flash Media Server 2 to another server?

Wow, the big three one.. almost as many tutorials as I am old. It's been a while since I've posted an FMS guru question up here because I've been responding privately with a few that just wouldn't pertain to most and found it a bit tough to write a more generic post for it. Anyways, this question falls under that category nicely, so here goes.

The question: How can I move FLV files that have been recorded with Flash Media Server 2 to another server?

The answer:
This is actually a very common request from clients and friends alike. How to get those FLV files off of the FMS server and over to the web server to played progressively.

I'd like to first start with giving a bit of insight as to why somebody would want to do this.

1. FMS2 is a lot of money for one pro license. If you can keep BW and connections to a minimum then you won't have to buy more licenses to keep up with demand. In the case of recording video, you need a connection and need to use FMS bandwidth, but not for playback. That can be done with a web server and save that cost.

2. Sometimes you just don't want to stream files and let people download the FLV to be cached for quicker playback later. It does have the drawback that the user can't seek ahead before download, but see #1 and think on the cost savings.

3. Sometimes you want both and of course FMS should be on it's own box. In this case you will need to copy the FLV files over to the web server, wherever that may be.

So how to do this?

It's going to depend on if the servers are on the same network, like an internal one maybe. In this case it's reasonably simple to make a small bit of code in a batch file or something to watch a particular folder. If a new file is put in the folder then copy it over to the other server. Unfortunately this is a rare problem for most and it's a requirement to get the files over the internet to another server.

My first and pretty much only suggestion would be to use FTP to move the files. It's just a matter of how to do that.

You can setup most FTP programs to watch a folder and when a new file is in there to copy over to another server. Or just setup a timer. The person asking this particular question is asking how to do that in ASP.NET. I don't know for sure, but I'm positive there has to be some kind of plugin(or maybe just straight out of the box) that will allow you to do FTPing. I've done it with ASP, so I would guess that ASP.NET can too.

Other than that there really isn't any other option. I suppose if you can setup virtual folders over the network then you can have FMS just record straight to another server (I've seen this done) but it's iffy when you then have to worry about network speed etc, so this is best practiced within an internal network.

Hope that helps a bit.

Ask an FMS Guru #26: Is there a command or a way to trim an FLV audio stream at a particular location?

Lots of questions coming through lately, I'll try to keep up. Here's one that has no good answer unfortunately but may be good to know for others if they are thinking to do the same thing. Two questions here:

The question: Is there a command or a way to trim an FLV audio stream at a particular location? and, Is there a command to append or combine two audio streams without replaying them and recording them into a new stream?

The answer:

The answer to both of these questions is an unfortunate no. The only way to trim up an audio only (or even a file with audio and video) is to record that stream again to another FLV and just stop it where you want it cut.

Which leads us to the next question on combining two streams. This would sure be a nice feature if FMS could do it. Combining streams into one would be quite cool but I don't expect it in FMS for a while. Again the only way to combine some streams is to play one server side and record it to a new stream (you could just append to one of the files I suppose if you don't need to keep it as is) and when that stream finishes playing then just play the next stream and append it to that new stream.

I sorta covered that topic here.

I suggest for these items to make a request to the FMS team themselves from here: Adobe Wishform

Watch out for the cat!

hahaha.. I can't help but laugh at this silly creation of mine.

That's my cat, I made him sit on a green screen while I played with this fuzzy ball above his head.

Anyways, go ahead and mouse over him if you can:

WiiFlash? When did this come about?

I have a Wii.. I have Flash too.. This looks very cool:

http://www.wiiflash.org/

Although their site is super slow I recommend waiting for stuff to show up because it's a pretty cool start to getting the Wii Remotes to work on your PC.

I haven't installed it yet, but I think I will next week to see if I can get something working. I must have been living in a closet to not have heard about this, seems to be around for a bit now. Enough that they are on v0.3. That's only 0.7 away from being a v1.0 Beta. :)

I also happen to have two remotes. I wonder if I can get this demo working.

Here are the docs if you're curious as to what is available to the flash player.

Ask an FMS Guru #19: I want to serve multiple FLV files from FMS2. Can this be done in a simple way?

Streaming video from FMS is probably one of the most common uses of the software. Here is a common question that I've seen:

The question: I want to serve multiple FLV files from FMS2. Can this be done in a simple way?

The answer:

A bit of background just in case.

There are two ways to stream FLV files at the moment. You can serve them from a web server (and there are a couple of ways to do this) or you can serve them from an FLV streaming server which in our case is Flash Media Server 2.0.4. Currently there are two other pieces of software out there that can stream FLV files. Red 5, which is an open source option, and Wowza which is a commercial product that works somewhat like FMS.

The difference between serving the files progressively (web server) and streaming is mainly that the file doesn't get cached on the client's computer and in theory is served faster to the client. There is a lot more information on the internet on this, so that's all I'll cover for now.

So, the idea is that we are going to use Flash and Flash Media Server to stream an FLV or multiple FLV files to our clients.

First up, let's get FMS ready to stream a file.

When installing FMS you will get a directory called "applications". It usually resides in the installation directory of FMS, but you can put it anywhere, and in fact are encouraged to move it elsewhere. But this isn't a chat on security or performance so I'll stay away from that for the time being.

In the applications directory, let's make a folder called "videostreaming". This is necessary to have clients connect up to the server itself and also a place to put our video files. Now it's important to note that you can put your videos in a central location, or multiple locations and specify those locations as virtual folders for FMS. That lets you keep videos in certain places on your server and access them from different applications. Handy.

So, we have the folder in the applications directory "videostreaming". In there, let's make a directory called "myvideos" and in there create another folder called "streams".

So:
applications-|
--------------videostreaming-|
--------------------------------myvideos-|
--------------------------------------------streams

In there, we put our video file. For this example we'll use the video file name of "video1.flv".

We have now setup FMS, let's move to Flash to build the client side.

To do this the most simple way I won't be covering controls for the video. Just how to start playing the FLV file.

Open up a new file in Flash and select the first frame and open up the actions panel.

We start off by creating a net connection to the server and then we'll watch to see when we connect up. Once connected up we will create a stream object and then play the FLV file. Playing the FLV file and showing it actually requires we make a video object, so we'll do that after the actionscript.

//create a netConnection object
var nc = new NetConnection();

//keep an eye on the status events, we need to know when we have connected up
nc.onStatus = function(info){
if(info.code == "NetConnection.Connect.Success"){
createStreamObject();
}
}

//this function is called once we have connected up to the server
function createStreamObject(){
//this is the netStream object that plays the video file
ns = new NetStream(nc);
//attach the video stream to the video object on the stage
vidObject.attachVideo(ns);
//play the video file that we put in the directory for the application
ns.play("video1");
}

//connect up
nc.connect("rtmp://MYSERVERIP/videostreaming/myvideos");

As you can see above, we are connecting to a server with the application name of "videostreaming" and the instance name is "myvideos". We put that in because that is the folder hierarchy that we created on Flash Media Server.

All that is left is to create a new layer in the timeline and make a new video object from the library panel menu. Place that on that layer on the stage and call the instance name "vidObject".

That's it! Run the file and you should have a video playing on the stage.

If it doesn't work, you need to find out if you are even connecting up to the server. That would require opening up the FMS admin panel and seeing if there are connections being made, and if there are then double check the filename and mistyping.

That is the most simplistic way to stream an FLV file. There is also the option to use the FLVPlayer component, that's a pretty good option too I think.

Looking for a plugin for IE and Firefox to stop Flash content

I don't ask for help much but I've had it with Flash content on news sites and need advice. I am dead sick of flash content all over sites that I use to gather information. It doesn't matter where you go now, every site has it. The annoying and invasive Flash animations, video, self clicking and good experience killing content.

For example, I use Yahoo! for most of my news viewing and they are constantly using flash to put something new up like new movies, cars, commercials for TV shows, products, iPod stuff etc.

Each and every one of these plays on it's own. You have to click it to stop it and that sucks in itself because sometimes if you roll over them they show up on a layer above the text and take up half the screen.

To top it all off, some of them send information back to the mothership if they have made it so far into whatever video it is, and every time they do this they "click", as if you pressed a link. This is invasive and annoying because if you go to an article and then press the back button to go back to the list you don't go back to where you were, you go back to the top of the list.. I don't think I am explaining it well.. but that's how it is.

All I can say is that I want to block Flash content when I choose to. How do I do that? There must be a plugin somewhere that does this with a click of a button.

Any direction would be appreciated. Looking to kill flash content in IE and Firefox for the time being on a windows machine.

This is so cool, I love this stuff (stereograms)

Made entirely in flash, I want the code... If anybody knows how to do this, can you let me know?

Go here:
http://www.flash-gear.com/stereo/

Create a picture, then press done and you get your stereogram.

Here's mine:
http://three.flash-gear.com/stereo/stereo.php?c=v&id=131811&k=20394491

AspUpload gets patched for Flash 8 File Upload implementation (Flash Player has a bug?)

This may be old news, but in the past (when Flash 8 came out) if you used Persist's AspUpload component to upload files from flash, the component would crash which in turn meant that any site using it on your server wouldn't work until the server was rebooted.. whether is was used with just asp or within flash from that point on. This was a pain but at the time we were able to implement Coldfusion file upload at the time so didn't have to worry about it.

We are currently working on a new uploader application in flash for a client and it has to be ASP on the server side. So, on that note I wandered off to the AspUpload page hoping that something had been done about it and to my delight they have fixed the component to work with Flash 8.

The interesting thing on their site though is that they claim that the flash player doesn't send the information to the server properly, hence the crash of the component.

Quote from Persist's site:
Version 8 of Macromedia Flash includes a file upload feature which allows a user to upload files from within a Flash applet instead of a multipart/form-data form. Due to what we believe to be a bug in the Macromedia Flash 8 implementation of file uploads, the data stream generated by such Flash applets is formatted differently than all major browser implementations, and that irregularity causes AspUpload to crash.

I wonder which is "in the wrong" on this issue.. I'm just glad that one of them decided it was worth it to address the problem.

Anyways, you can DL the patched version of the component here.

[Presentation Video] Best Practices & Architecture for Flash & Flash Media Server 2.0

I've finally managed to get the video I took of my session on Best Practices & Architecture for Flash & Flash Media Server 2.0 that I did at MAX Korea 2005. I did have two other versions, one from Singapore and one from Hong Kong, but the Korea one seemed best because we had over an hour for our sessions, whereas the others were one hour or less. So there is more content in this one.

The video is Flash 8 streamed from FMS2 with the captions put in for the whole video with Captionate 2.0. I've got to say that this app rules! It's a serious pain to get all the captions (took me 4 hours for 1 hour of video to type them all out), but once you have them, Captionate just makes it easy to embed in the FLV file and in turn integrate into the our Flash application.

Anyways, I have one more video I want to get up, Testing for Security Holes in Flash and Flash Media Server which I have captured but just need to edit. The one I am using is from the Hong Kong MAX conference. It shouldn't take me too much longer, but I am doing it only in my spare time.. which I'm lacking more and more of lately. Either way, I expect to have it up next week at the latest.

Video Presentation link

Here is the link again to the presentation files just in case.

And the session details:
Best Practices for Development and Architecture for Flash Media Server

Make a shooting game that works by pointing your camera at the screen

This is interesting I thought. This developer has made a quick prototype of using your camera by pointing it at the screen and moving crosshairs around based on where the camera is looking.

In other words, you could stick your camera on the end of your mouse, point it at the screen, it will track where the camera is looking, then use the mouse button to shoot or something.

Pretty cool stuff. Make sure to get your camera close enough that it can see the red dots, but not too close that it can't see the rest of the black part.

Here is the link (japanese site): http://psyark.jp/?entry=20051208003209

via MediaCreator.jp

Just a quick blur jpg slideshow for now

Nothing special, move on, move on :) just thought I'd post it though.

You'll need the flash player 8 for this:

JPG blur slideshow

I really like that this can be done with nothing but actionscript and bitmaps.

Cripes.. talk about jumping in your seat

You have got to try this out. It's an interesting way to get across the message.

Post in the comments if you think you know what kind of message they are trying to get across.

Link to most interesting banner

Via A LOT

Sorenson Squeeze (4.1) FLV Metadata upate...

Back in August of 2004, shortly after its release, we blogged about a problem we came across with SS4 not correctly writing much needed metadata to FLV files it generates. You can read the original post here. In the comments of that post, you will see that I received a response from their support department that the problem had been passed on to the techs and they were working on a solution, that would probably be available in a point release.

Well, I noticed today that 4.1 had been released (AFTER 8 MONTHS) and hurriedly downloaded it with much anticipation of being able to output valid, useful FLV files, without relying on other software. Their updates do not seem to come with a readme on what has been fixed, nor does the update site seem to supply such information. However, as this is a Flash centered program and that was one of the most obvious problems, I just assumed it was fixed. After some tests, my hopes were soon dashed against the rocks and I remembered that little saying about not ASSuming...

SSOOO, I sent another email off to support, asking what exactly was updated... Below is my original email and that returned from their support staff.

---------------My Original Mail to Support------------------------------
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 7:17 AM
To: Support@sorenson.com
Subject: Bug Report
First Name: Kris
Last Name: Honeycutt
Email: kris.honeycutt@solid-thinking.com
Operating System: Windows
Product: Sorenson Squeeze
Product Version: 4.0 (they haven’t updated their support form for 4.1 yet...)

Problem Description: I recently installed the 4.1 upgrade for Sorenson Squeeze for Flash MX (from version 4.0) and I am curious what was changed. I was hoping the issue with Squeeze 4.0 writing incorrect meta data to FLV files was resolved, however it still seems to be present. Please confirm.

---------------Support Response------------------------------

Kris,
That function was not added to Squeeze 4.1. I am told it may not be included until Squeeze 5 is released next year.

Andy Engberson

Technical Support

Sorenson Media
4393 South Riverboat Road Ste. 300
Salt Lake City, Utah 84123
---------------------------------------------------

To the support dept’s credit, Mr. Engerson's response time was excellent, however waiting 8 months for an update and STILL not having the problem fixed seems rather ridiculous to me, seeing as one of the products primary functions is to export FLV files....

If they wait long enough, I am not sure how many people will even care when the fix does finally come, considering Macromedia's licensing deal with On2 for using their video technology in future versions of Flash...

Flash ignores PDF Master password/encryption settings?

Perhaps this is commonly known and I missed the memo, but thought I would post to see if anyone had more information.

I was working with some PDF docs today from which I needed to extract vector logo data to use in a Flash project. When I attempted to open the file in Illustrator, I was confronted with the Password entry panel. Not having the pass, I thought I should try a few more apps and continued to fail in importing or opening in Acrobat, Freehand and Photoshop.

As a last ditch effort, I thought I would try to import directly into Flash. Much to my surprise, I was able to import each page of the document, fully layered and editable….

Perhaps the PDF docs were old and using 24-bit encryption (unlike the newer 128-bit) but regardless, I would think Adobe would not be pleased...

Can anyone out there enlighten me on this?

Flash Lite and Alpha Transparent PNGs

I was recently working on a little Flash Lite (1.0) project targeted at DoCoMo 900/901 handsets and came across something odd with PNG files.

In the project I had a small animation created from an imported sequence of alpha transparent PNG files, which were exported from Swift 3D 4. After importing into Flash, everything looked fine, but I wanted to do some minor touch up work in Photoshop. After completing revisions and updating the library items in Flash, I exported the SWF (flash lite 1.0) and uploaded to our test server. While the animation appeared as expected on a PC, those "slides" I edited in PS displayed on the mobile phones with a black background.

At a loss for what was happening, I started to backtrack to figure out what was different in the edited files. Both were exported as PNG with alpha transparency. The difference was, by default Swift exports 32bit PNG files with alpha transparency, Photoshop only exports up to 24bit. I had not read anywhere in the Flash Lite (for DoCoMo) docs that this was an issue, but, I guess it is.

The fix was to open the PS exported PNG docs in Macromedia Fireworks and export as 32bit. Problem solved!

I'm not sure if this happens on any other devices that support Flash Lite, but hopefully it helps someone out of a bind.

Foma 901i with Flash Lite 1.1

NTT DoCoMo has announced the release of the 901i series of phones for their 3G FOMA service. The focus this time around seems to be on "3D" graphics and sound, but what I am most interetested in is the support for Flash Lite 1.1 (Which they are referring to as "Power-up Flash"..hehe). However, I will curb my enthusiasm until I find out if DoCoMo has managed to strip 1.1 of any of its useful features during their "port" of the player.

DoCoMo staggers the release of models in a series. The first is to hit the market here in Japan on December 1st.

Official 901i site (Japanese only)

English Press release

Flash Lite 1.1 for AU

The time is coming around again for me to pick up another mobile phone. One of the primary reasons is in order to test content. Up to this point I have been a loyal NTT DoCoMo user (5 handsets in 3 years) and my current primary mobile is an SH900i for Docomo's 3G Foma service. Besides the wide array of features (Mega pixel camera, video phone, java games, web enabled, etc), my primary reason for upgrading was to have support for 100kb Flash Lite 1.0 movies. Prior to this I was using the 505i series that were the first phones to support Flash Lite (20kb max). I have been creating Flash Lite content since the beta release was made available to some content providers here in Japan and since that time have pretty much pushed the medium to its limits (which are not all that vast), but... I digress.

This time around I am thinking of going with an AU handset by provider KDDI. In November, they will be releasing the "Talby" (pictured below), a stylish little phone that supports the Flash Lite 1.1 player. I have been itching to develop some solutions using 1.1, exploiting the capabilities that are so painfully absent from the DoCoMo 1.0 port (ability to pull/push data from external sources, send variables, load movie, fscommand/fscommand2, etc), but without a true handset to test on, it is rather pointless. Yes, there are emulators, but these do an extremely poor job of reflecting one of the biggest issues in Flash Lite dev....system resource usage.

We have already started throwing around ideas for having the phone interface with some of our PC RIA (note that 1.1 still uses a subset of AS 4.0). So, we will keep you updated once the R&D begins!

How'dju make da video spoof??

I got quite a few questions on how I made that MM video banner spoof and finally put some time aside to make an article on it that flashstreamworks.com has been so generous to host. It turned out to be 7 pages though... so you'll most likely need a cup of coffee or something if you are going to sit down and read it. Please let me know your thoughts on the article if you have 'em :)

You can check it out here.

Any known issues with streaming FLV files from Linux/Apache Servers?

We are currently finishing up development of a web site for a client and have moved to migrating the site to their server. One of the sites features is displaying product and event related videos. Videos are displayed by streaming FLV files to a custom player we developed. The player is told which FLV to load by being passed the URL through a Flashvar.

The system has been working fine all through development on our Windows 2003 server, however after moving the site to the clients Linux server, the FLV files no longer stream. The player opens, but no video. I tested on another Linux (Redhat) server with a different provider and had no problems such problem.

We have tried a few things to remedy the issue:

1.We thought perhaps the server was not recognizing the FLV file type, however we were able to successfully download the FLVs when accessing them directly.

2.Previously the links in the Falshvars were relative paths. Changed these to absolute paths, but it made no difference.

3.CHMODed the FLV files to open up permissions. Again, no change…but not surprised really

4.Chatted with the hosts support team for about 30 minutes, but they were unable to figure out why it was not working as well.

5.Reloaded the files to the server to make sure nothing was corrupt.

6.Currently linking to the files on our server, but that is obviously not an ideal fix, however it will do in the short term.

Has anyone experienced this problem or have suggestions on resolving it? (Other than switching hosts…)?

Thanks,
Kris

Flash player version stats in Japan

About 3 weeks ago I setup an automatic flash player version detection poll app on the community site (www.3enhancedesigners.com) I run. It's nothing too great but does take advantage of Flash Remoting to get the results into an Access database which then in turn updates the view which is a pie chart.

I've seperated out the types of computers (windows or mac) along with how many of those computers have whatever version of the flash player on their systems. After getting the player version of the computer it sets a shared object so that it doesn't go taking it again. So far up to today there are a total of 2407 entries.

Of those entries to the DB, 2017 are windows and 390 are mac. Quite a difference but it does go to show that maybe macs are catching up a bit? Not sure really as most people who would come to this site are not your average moms and dads really. Most would be designers or developers that are looking to get some help from the community or read up on some tutorials on whatever program they are having trouble with. Even so, I think quite a few people do visit from work or maybe even the family computer, so the numbers might not be too biased.

The numbers on flash versions are as following:
Windows:
version 7.0.14.0 and up: 95%
version 6.0.29.0 and up 5% with the majority at 6.0.79.0 3%
There is one person out there with the version 7.0.35.5.... I think that is Breeze or something..

Mac:
version 7.0.14.0 and up: 93%
version 6.0.21.0 and up: 7% with the majority at 6.0.79.0 3%
With 5 users using the version 7.0.2.0 bit of weird version number there.

Not bad statistics so far. I plan to keep the poll up for a month, then take it down for a few. When I put it back up again for another month or so, I'm quite curious as to what the difference will be. Will it be local, here in Japan, or will the difference also reflect the increase in version internationally too? Not many who can't speak Japanese would come to this site, but who knows... I have seen some translators links in my logs.

Not sure if these stats are useful to anybody, but I thought I'd post just in case somebody out there was curious as to how Japan may be doing. Pretty good I think, and the version penetration can only get better.

My spoof on MM's new flash video banner

When I first saw the new flash video banner a little less than a week ago I was quite impressed with the quality compared with the speed it streamed in. It took me a bit to figure it out, but they are definitely using Flash Communication Server for that. I truly wonder how they aren't burning up their FCS servers having it on the home page with the amount of people that go through there maybe not even watching the whole video. Connections/disconnections.. I did something like that once on my site and FCS crashed the server after about 10000 connections/disconnections or so. It just wasn't cleaning stuff up fast enough. I'm sure they've messed with that part in FCS though so that it doesn't happen to them.

So, on to what I created and why.

The banner that I'm talking about is the one with the blonde girl wandering across looking at the "flash video gallery". This banner they made I found quite impressive and thought to myself "that's pretty cool, great effect on the user and it's not intrusive. It's got an impact yet is not impacting". If you just had the video on there and no girl walking across it would have much less of an effect I think, and if it was just a girl walking across the screen you wouldn't have the "gallery" theme that it is based on.

Not only that, I was extremely impressed with the quality of the video in all, especially with the keying work they did with the girl. Most likely they have an expensive studio on hand with some high end cameras and all the software to do it in. I'd love to know their process and equipment they used, though I have some idea..

While looking at it, I wondered how they got the video so clean yet FLV video files don't support alpha.. did they do it with PNG's? Nope, the whole thing is one FLV, which surprised me because I couldn't see the telltale "shifting" of pixels when graphics are compressed with video. It really did look like the video was on top of the graphics that were in flash.

Thinking on all of this, I decided that I wanted to build the same thing, mainly just to see if I could do it really and how close I could get the quality to the original.

If you haven't seen the real thing, then here it is (reload the page until you get the banner with the girl and "flash gallery").

Mine is a bit different though (It's a guy version... starring yours truly) and the theme is a bit different though the design is close to the same. Unfortunately, I don't have a vodafone phone nor a wrist watch that I can talk to my buddies on, so I had to settle for my Docomo Fujitsu F900iT (which happens to be the latest and greatest model out right now in Japan) to chat it up with video (which it can actually do.. and it's very very cool, but expensive, to have a vid chat on your phone). The second vid is a dragon boat race that I actually competed in a couple of years ago (hell of a lot of fun, I recommend it to anyone) spiffed up with some extra voice stuff I had and some "news" graphics. Here's my version. Keeping in mind this is a "funny" version, not meant seriously in anyway. All fun and games :D It's also not an FCS version (progressive) so if it streams funny, just reload the page 'cause I haven't bothered with preloading or anything (too lazy)

The tools of my trade you ask? Premiere pro 1.5 to get the vid off my Sony T30 handycam. After Effects 6.5 to chroma key the vid of me walking around, warp the vid in the phone and mix a few vids to get the right feeling of a "beach party" plus the mixing of voice and vid for the "flash news". Adobe Audition 1.5 to mess with the sounds a bit to get them the right tone for what would be the phone's tiny speaker sound, and to tone down some of the other voices/sound. After it was all edited together, I then brought it into Squeeze 4.0 to spit it out as an flv (which turned out great!) and then it was off to FlashMX2004 to make up the script to load in the flv, set the button and back graphics. I originally had the back graphics in the video but decided it would be best to just keep that in flash and mask the corners of the vid so that it didn't show outside of the white area. Graphics were all done in Photoshop, but I have to say.. I'm not much of a graphic person...

I think it turned out pretty good actually (not to toot my own horn but...) and I'm quite happy with what I learnt in the process. Taking video, keying, editing it and getting it ready for Flash and the web is quite a process I think, and at times there is quite a bit of trial and error. It takes more time when your comp is bogged down due to too many high-end cpu/memory hogging apps running at the same time, but nothing too bad (playin' with the cats and stuff while waiting for renders...etc). It's not like I haven't done this stuff before, but I found this time to be a bit different. Can't really explain it, but it was like trying to not only achieve a goal, but to surpass it and go the extra distance. No money involved, no clients, just a desire to see a theme, project, idea in my mind come to life. In fact, this idea bugged me so much I ended up staying up the night rebuilding my little studio here and setting up all the equipment, then taking the video! At like 5 in the morning! :D But it's ideas that come to me just as I'm about to go to sleep that really work out. The only problem is that if I don't get up and do it.. I usually forget half of it, and never go about getting it done.

A truly fun experience, and I'm even thinking of making a couple more versions as I've had some seriously funny ideas come to me from friends that I'd like to put in. Spoofs.. like Monty Python. I love those guys.. way too funny.

Mac FLA to PC?

I am curious if anyone has found a workaround to opening a Mac FLA on a PC. In the past I have used MacOpener (www.macopener.com) to access Mac media, but it only works with cross platform files formats and FLA is not on the list.

This hasn’t been much of an issue, but recently our company started an internship program for web students at the local university. Being the main Flash guy, they ask me questions and have me look at files to help them figure things out. The problem is that they ALL work on Macs and I am on Win XP. While I can go and work on their systems, I occasionally work from home, where I do not have access to a Mac.

Any tips are greatly appreciated.

Some comments on MX2004 if you will..

First off, I have to say I am quite disappointed in the performance of FlashMX2004. I'm a dev'er so most of my work is in the actions panel and it is soooooo irritating to work in, due to the sloooooowness of it. *Especially* typing in Japanese. And when it gets over 150 lines of code or so, it's just not even worth using. Now I'm sure there are a few of you out there going "Did you install the updater?".. well, I just bought Studio MX2004 the other day so it should be the updated version, and it does say 7.01. Which brings me to a quick point about MM's Japanese online store... it sucks. I couldn't buy the upgrade. I even went ahead and registered (which I've already DONE on the US one) but no go. It kept telling me that there was no upgrade download version.. 20 mins later...I ended up going to the US/Canada one. Now I have to pay Visa's exchange rate on the USD.

Either way, for ANY major apps I work on, I have to go back to MX just because the actions panel sucks so much.. what a bummer. I do actually like the look of it though, and the data components rule! Though I'm not sure when a project that uses them will come in. Going to have to make something up. :) All in all.. performance sucks and I'm really looking forward to the next update (if there is one).

Moving on to Dreamweaver, I have no complaints whatsoever. This is a great upgrade in my mind. It looks good, clean, ..the buttons are a bit different and having the tabs on top threw me off for a bit there, but the performance is great, and I was actually pleasantly surprised to see all the pages that I had up when I closed Dreamweaver in a hurry when going to have dinner, and coming back to open Dreamweaver and they're all there. Nice touch.

I haven't messed with Fireworks yet just because I'm more of a Photoshop kind of guy, but I really like the inline (what is that word they use in the intro's on MM's site?) editing feature. It was good in MX, but seems much better in MX2004. For basic stuff I use Fireworks, so my tute pages are going to get that much easier to mess with.

I can't say I regret buying StudioMX2004 mainly because Dreamweaver has got just so much better, but if I were to rate it on Flash... Could it be my drivers? Don't other people have the same problem? I did hear from a fellow flasher that "FlashMX2004 rox!" so I'm assuming this shouldn't be a problem.

On a last note, has anybody noticed the difference when using the mouse scroller in the actions panel, and in the main panel when editing an .as or .asc file? I like the movement I get out of the actions panel, but the main one increments by like.. 0.5 of a line for every click my mouse scroller makes... quite weird.

If anybody has any tips for me on getting better performance out of the actions panel.. please post in the comments if you have a moment.

Gauging resource consumption when creating content for Docomo mobile phones

One of my regular activities at the office is creating Flash content for the Docomo 505i/505is and 900i series of mobile phones. I am rather lucky (or cursed) to have access to all (17) of the handsets for testing. While the Flash players for the various phones are all basically the same, the hardware specifications are not, so, what works on one phone may crash the browser of another. Sounds similar to developing for any platform I guess, however the phones are far pickier than their Pocket PC/PDA mobile cousins.

When creating Flash Lite content for the Docomo phones there are a lot of restrictions and idiosyncrasies that you have to learn to work within, or better yet, exploit. While it is fairly easy to stay below the file size limitations (20k for the 505i/is, 100k for 900i), tolerate the 8-10fps and avoid unsupported Actionscript (think flash 4 with limitations), the biggest issue is system resources. As you all know, Flash does not have a monitor for system resources and the various FP players will pretty much take whatever they can get their code on. While not generally an issue on desktops and notebooks, it is a huge problem for mobile devices, especially in phones that lack the processing power of Pocket PCs and PDAs. This is one reason that the phone simulator should only be used for the most basic testing and otherwise be avoided. While it provides a way to test screensize and basic interaction, the simulator has the full resources of the computer at its disposal, so does not realistically portray how a movie will play. To be perfectly honest, I NEVER use it, but I understand that many designers/developers have no other choice, so it is better than nothing.

Another issue that serves to complicate matters is the lack of details given by the phones during error reporting. It consists of basically three message (I know I am simplifying things here).
1. The file is unsupported
2. The file is too big.
3. The file (image) is not functioning correctly

While number 1 and 2 are easy to solve (export as flash 4/lite, make the movie smaller), number 3 is the BIG ONE. This can be anything from misbehaving Actionscript to the phone hanging on processing the number of vectors present. I have found that more often than not, it is an issue of resource availability. Through extensive testing (coupled with a good share of cursing in English and Japanese), I have found a good way to pinpoint if it is an issue of resources and how to detect potential problem areas during development.

The Bandwidth Profiler is your friend.
When testing Flash Lite movies, I set the bandwidth profiler to show the Frame by Frame Graph and to mimic a connection of 2.4kbs. (This is not to portray how the file actually loads when online, because the phones download raters are much faster.) While running a movie, look for spikes in the bandwidth usage above 7 kbs, especially in a movie that has any animation, much Actionscript or is entirely vector. A single bitmap that causes a spike is not as big an issue, as the phone is not having to process vectors, although there is a whole other area of problems associated with bitmap graphics (something I will try and write on later). These are areas that will make the slower phones crash due to a lack of resources. Generally 6-7kbs is fine, but over that and you are asking for trouble. A way to double check if it is resources is see where the animation encounters an error on the phone. If is corresponds to a frame with a bandwidth spike, you most likely need to stagger the graphics over a few frames. Below is a “real world” example of a project I am doing right now.

The project is a Flash “machiuke”. Basically this is an animated desktop/standby screen for the phones. The piece in question is fairly simple, with only a small amount of animation and no scripting beyond a stop().When our testers ran it through all the phones, it encountered problems on almost all of the 505i/is handsets (I do direct testing on my 900i during dev, which tells me they actually increased the phone specs in the 900i series and not just the file size of SWF supported). It weighs in at 13 KB, so file size is not the issue.

I opened up the file to see what might be causing the problems and it seems I was a bad little designer and have it all in one frame, causing 13kbs to be processed all at one time, in an entirely vector design. I got sloppy due to a tight deadline and multitasking on projects and only focused on file size. Bad me! Bad Designer! No cookie! (Sorry, lack of sleep and all).

So, what I did was spread the three main elements out over three frames. Background and border load in the first frame, one animated element in frame 2 and the second animated element (a character) in the third. This dropped the bandwidth consumption to just over 4k per frame and it runs with no problems on all the phones.

Hope this helps someone out. I will try and post more on the topic of Flash Lite design and development in the future, but until that time, feel free to contact me with any questions.

Kris

Flash Player 7 updater... is messed up.. -updated-

This is the first time I've seen the automatic flash updater, and to be honest I was quite surprised. Unfortunately it looks like there is a bug in the pop up window buttons, here is an image.

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Update:
After taking the time to actually read the tiny font of what each button is (which is the 3 squished lines in the middle), I realized *after* I pressed the button (to get rid of the window that pops up in the middle of the screen), I had pressed the wrong button.
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FP7 video object bug fix tutorial

Last night I received an email from a fellow developer that was really in a pickle (when a fellow dev guy says he's about to cry like a 12 year old girl...) about a bug with the video object in Flash. I tried to explain to him what it was before that on the flashcom figgyleaf list but I wasn't getting my point across quite as well as I would have liked to I guess.

So due to the circumstances he was in, I couldn't stand by and watch him get fired or something from work and immediately cooked up a quick tute to help him solve his problem.

The bug is with the video object only in the flash player 7. I wrote a past post on this here. If you test this with FP6 it will work fine. My fix entails that you attach the video object to the stage each time you want to attach the cam to it so that it will reset and show the video properly each and every time, this will only be required if somebody else had been using that video object before you.

The only thing is (in this example) in the av presence component the buttons are above the video on the stage but when you attach the video by AS, they end up below the video so you have to find a way around that, maybe by placing them below the video object or placing them on a level above the video with AS. I haven't covered that part..

Keep in mind that this is not a component fix (fyi, in the tute I am using v1 components, and only because it is an easy example), it is the fix for all video objects.

I'm actually quite surprised that other developers haven't either noticed or said anything, and a bit more surprised that MM won't recognize that this is a bug in the FP7.

Here's the video tutorial. It's about 5 mins.

If it has helped you (or not maybe), please let me know in the comments.

Screenshot Quirkiness in Flash

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program, Professor FCS, to bring you a short message on "Screenshot Quirkiness in Flash".

While doing some sceenshot/captures of the Flash authoring environment today, I came across something odd when I accidentally pasted back into the Flash.

Below is a screenshot taken using the PrintScreen key and pasted into Photoshop.

Nothing strange to see here..please move along..move along...

Now the below is the result if the same capture was pasted into Flash.

All of the white background is alpha transparency. It seems to only have captured part of the stage and random icons from both my OS and Flash. Very strange and not something I have ever had happen with another program. Has anyone else experienced this and more importantly, know why it happens?

The system specs are WinXP Pro, Flash MX and an NVIDIA Quadro 4 900XGL graphics card.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Thank You.

A funny thing about rendering html in text fields

I make a lot of chat apps with flash. Lobby chats, one on one chats, group chats, presentation chats... in the end they are really the same thing I guess and whenever I make a chat I start with a text box on the stage. I then press the little "render as HTML" button in the properties window (gotta have colors and sizes and links and stuff), and proceed to put in my code and run it.

Here's the problem. Everytime the chat starts from the second line in the text box, not the first line, so there is a weird one line space at the top. But only in the beginning. Since this annoyed me I used to solve the problem by initializing the app with a chat_txt.text=""; and the line feed would go away and it would be normal again. But this didn't go well with me and I was really looking for a way to find out why or how I could not have this happen.

It turns out, if you have a text object on the stage and you press the little icon to render it out to html, a line of html code automatically gets put in the text box. It has a

in it and this causes a line feed and gives me my problem. Though, if you set the text field to normal again, and go to the actions panel and enter chat_txt.html=true; it doesn't put the line feed in, and the text object is rendered out as html. This is the proper way it should work... Is it a bug? Don't know, and since it's only FlashMX then I'm sure nobody really cares, but I'm quite curious if the same problem (problem? or is it supposed to act like this?) happens in flashMX2004. If I'm the last guy on this earth to actually realize something so basic then so be it, but I'm sure there are a couple of you going "really? hmm"... or something along those lines :)

Font formats and getFontList ()

One of my recent projects included the development of a small font browser/viewer application, which is launched from an active desktop containing various little tools to help in media design (font browser, color scheme planner, links to programming/scripting resources and various syntax lookup.).

The font viewer generates a list of the available fonts on a users system using the getFontList() method of the TextField class. Functionality includes the option to select a font name and have it applied to default text, input custom text, apply formatting (bold, italic) and set point size. I knew when going into this that not all fonts on a system would be readable. For example, Adobe PostScript/Type1 fonts, however a problem I ran into was a large number of Japanese fonts on my system would not correctly display, although they did appear in the generated font list. My first thought was that I had made a scripting error or not included the proper formatting. After looking through the code and browsing some online resource I was at a loss. While one font would display perfectly, the next in the list (from the same font house and font family), would not. Rather clueless at this point, I turned to Graeme to pick his wealth o' Flash knowledge, but still could not figure out the problem (Thanks for the help anyway Graeme!)

*Note: Setting the System.useCodepage property to true made no difference.

After all this, I assumed the problem must have its origin outside the Flash Player. Read on to see what I found.

As I mentioned previously, I was aware some fonts would or would not display in the font list, however I DIDN'T know that some fonts would be listed, but not be fully supported. I figured this out after I opened up my fonts folder (working in Win2k) and looked for the specific fonts not displaying...and was hit with the fact that they were a different flavor or TrueType. Rather than your standard True Type Font (TTF), these were True Type Collection (TTC) fonts. It turns out that none of these (Japanese or otherwise) would display correctly when applied in the font browser.

After figuring that out, I went ahead to experiment with another format as well, OpenType. With OpenType, it is really impossible to tell if they will display or not. Simply put, some will and some won't. Because OT can have different extensions and allow for greater options for the type designer (encoding, type of curves, etc), you just have to test to see what will work and what will not.

Below are examples of the icons (win2k) for each font format I mentioned above. Maybe this information was already common knowledge, but if not, I hope someone finds it useful and they do not have to waste as much time as I did finding the cause of the problem.

Finally, it should be noted that while they did not display in the font browser, all three (True Type, True Type Collection and OpenType) displayed perfectly within the Flash authoring environment.

Lord of the Rings RIA?

In the Lord of the rings site, there is what I would call an RIA. You can see how things were built by video with audio, and just in case you don't have audio, there are comments that run with the video on the side. Also 3 different sections that are viewable. Easy to use, easy to understand, very well built I think.

On a side note that doesn't have so much to do with flash, I really liked how they explained about lighting and effects they did. Very very interesting stuff I think, definitely something I'd like to get into. The lighting alone can change the feeling of a scene completely. Not only that they have normal people, graphics, 3d models and effects that all have to match up. I've tried this a bit with some keyed material that I shot and it's definitely not easy. Takes a good eye and a lot of checking. Make sure you have a quick comp if you're going to get into keying and effects.