With a few moments of time on my hands again I've put up one more new free video tutorial this week on FMSGuru.com called "The basics of using the DVR functionality in Flash Media Server 3.5". It's a long one clocking in at a huge 43 minutes... where does the time go? This makes for a grand total of 30 tutorials.. my goodness.
In this tutorial we cover the basics of making a DVR video player for Flash and Flash Media Server. This application is built in AS3 and has two parts, the publisher and the player. The publisher sends out the live video and the player plays that video with the ability to scrub back in time to catch the beginning or middle and of course scrub right back to the live point. Just like DVR on your TV. There is a small amount of server side code but it isn't required for this application.
We've got another new free video tutorial up on FMSGuru.com called "Switching between two live streams on the client side ". This tutorial covers the basics of switching between two different live streams on the client side. Essentially it allows you to switch to one live stream from another in the case that you want to watch one or another, like changing channels on your TV. Other little tidbits of information for server side coding, net streams and live video are discussed throughout the tutorial as we go along.
On a side note I came across a blog entry on Jay Charles' site covering some gotchas for developing in AS3 and FMS which I think is rather useful, worth posting here for those that are getting into AS3 and FMS.
I've recently got a question about the difference between the different methods of connecting to Flash Media Server (or Wowza or Red5 for that matter) and figured this is good material for a written article rather than a video tutorial. For the purpose of this article I may refer only to FMS but the same information can be applied to Wowza and Red5.
What are the different protocols?
For connecting up to a media server of your choice (see above) there are 5 different methods. I'll try to cover them in some detail here.
1. RTMP
2. RTMPT
3. RTMPS and RTMPTS
4. RTMPE
5. RTMFP
See the rest of the article here
We've got a new free video tutorial up on FMSGuru.com called "Setting up a timer on the server side to start an event". In this tutorial we cover how to set up a timer on the server side to simulate playing a live event by creating a server side stream to play a video. This could be useful for all kinds of applications that need to do something at a particular time or when something should be triggering it like a particular amount of users etc. The client side is simple and in AS2 as the server side coding is where the focus is at in this tutorial.
Check it out when you have a moment, it's the first tutorial I've done in the Mac OS environment.
This is nice to see finally, some good material on deploying FMIS on a large scale. There's always been the issue out there that the edge-origin configuration of FMS is just a tad too expensive for most. Some have gone ahead and built their own framework for the failover and clustering of FMS and it's gone well. So it looks like Adobe has finally seen perhaps that edge-origin sales aren't quite there? and gone ahead and put out an article on how to do your own failover/clustering system in FMS with code, not software.
Good on them. Too bad the PDF won't download for me... not sure what's up with that, I'll try again tomorrow or something. Go check it out here though in case it works for you.
What I will say worked for me and has great documentation is the other piece they just put out, LiveStreamCast. This is sample code and docs to support it (I read them over, they're quite good) in making said failover application with an origin, intermediate and edge node system. All on FMIS. You don't need to buy the edge-origin configuration. Nice.
Check that out on the FMS tools page.
I just wanted to quickly post up a few bug tracking links related to FMS in hopes that more will put in some votes to increase the importance of them. With any luck... they'll get resolved.
This one is the most important in my opinion (they've already got it in the connect addin):
Acoustic Echo cancellation support
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-273
Allow screensharing over RTMP
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1100
Byte access for netstream object
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-5
I'll update this list as more is brought to my attention.
Just wanted to let everybody know that another FMS video tutorial has gone up. This time I cover the issue of chat flooding and how to control it on the server side. Pretty useful concept I think. Check out the list here.
A little bit late but thought it best to be consistent and post it up that FMS 3.5 has an update with a bunch of bug fixes to it. Lookin' good. You should probably give it a go if you are having any issues with crashing or memory issues. Remember to back up your old config files and applications. Go get it here:
Flash Media Server update page
I'm not keeping up on this blog lately and keep forgetting to post when a new tutorial is up on FMSGuru.com. So here is the latest:
The Basics of Working with FMLE and FMS
This tutorial talks about the basics of Flash Media Live Encoder and how to use it with Flash Media Interactive Server to record the video that is being sent out live to the server. The server side code that is taught enables that small record button at the bottom of FMLE to work. Handy! There is also a bit on the client side in Flash that shows how to make a very basic live video player in Actionscript 3.
The one before that was a couple of weeks back:
Introduction and Installation of Flash Media Server 3.5
This video tutorial talks about the newly released Flash Media Server 3.5 installation process. I cover the differences between the 3 versions that are out, installation and details on what is new with this release, primarily the new HTTP proxying and Apache server.
I hope they're useful :) Lots more to come in the near future. I've got more ideas than I can shake a virtual stick at.
Today Adobe has released Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 and Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5. You can now download the FREE Development server right now and try it out for yourself from http://www.adobe.com/go/fms/. Adobe has also released Flash Media Live Encoder 3.0 with support for multi-bitrate encoding plus DVR functionality. You can download FMLE3 for FREE from http://www.adobe.com/go/fme/.
Check out Kevin Towes blog entry here for even more details
Just in case you didn't know, tomorrow at 9am PST we are having our very first Flash Media Server User Group meeting! It's a virtual group at the moment meaning that we aren't in a specific area of the world where you meet up at some spot in a city or whatever. We'll be meeting up in a connect meeting and going from there.
Check out the FMS user group here: http://groups.adobe.com/groups/2d1f7135c6/summary
Looking for a whitepaper describing what FMS3 is all about? Well, Lisa Larson was put to the task of describing it in no less than 50 pages! I'm a bit late to put a link on here but I do see that people are searching for info on fms3 and arriving here and this is a good tidbit of information I think. Even though it's on the main page for Flash Media Server on the Adobe site, it's not immediately noticeable I think and a whitepaper such as this should be noted by all that use the server software. So here is a direct link to the PDF whitepaper on FMS3, just in case.
I've read it, it's quite good and describes a lot of the features and performance increases in comparison to FMS2. Definitely recommend checking it out.
Ever since I got up the new FMS community site fmsguru.com it's been kinda rare to get in anymore "Ask an FMSGuru" questions. I think people are just asking on the forum now or are finding their answers in the ever increasing amount of information that is on the internet about Flash Media Server. That's good I think. This particular question came in a while back and I quite literally just completely forgot about it. Sorry about that Mr. Question Sender.
The question: How do I load test my Flash Media Server applications?
The answer:
Boy this is a bit of a tough question. My first answer to this is to find a whole bunch of users to try it out. But that isn't always possible. If you happen to have a huge site with lots of users that are willing to play with the app for you to see how it runs, then great. Go for it, some people will do some testing for a free week of some service on your site or something, some will just do it because they care about the site itself. But, for the most part this isn't quite a possibility. So what else can we do?
First thing to think about is what kind of app it is. I'd say for the most part people are wondering how a data centric app is going to run. Like chats or conference applications maybe. Games are a big one too and sometimes just to see how well the server can handle lots of streams others may have a request to load test a live streaming app or prerecorded video streaming app. If you are testing a game or chat or conference app then it's important to write a bit of an AI for your app. In other words, it has to act without you doing anything so that you can watch it go.
As a basic example for a chat app you would write a quick script that randomly tosses in sentences of varying lengths to the chat at various times. This would sort of simulate a bunch of users chatting rampantly. More computers the better. Then perhaps this chat has a video feature in it where up to 5 users or something can send video. So you have to setup computers that have cameras connected to them and again have each app randomly start sending it's video. Maybe when somebody's video is detected then others will automatically play it etc. All of these things are important to see how your application is going to react to different types of loads and reacts to your code both on server and client side. Doing a very controlled test is COMPLETELY different from doing a random test like that where you don't essentially press "play" on the sending side, and after visually confirming that the video is sending and a little camera icon shows up in the userlist to then pressing "play" on the receiving side to watch that video and a little eye icon shows up on the userlist to indicate to the other user that you are watching them. This kind of stuff just plain breaks if your code has holes in it or isn't timed well.
Now, I wouldn't call it easy to go about creating that type of code and I wouldn't really know where to begin to put up some generic code to get somebody started with it because every app is different in how it's going to work and what will need to be tested and how the AI should be implemented. But the idea is there and should give you a bit of a start on where to go with the testing process.
There are a few options here for getting the numbers in. Find access to a bunch of computers and get a couple more friends etc to run a few instances of the app at the same time to see how it goes. Next best is to have a few computers running many instances of the app on one HTML page. Essentially you embed something like 10 instances in one HTML page, passing in flashvars that are all different (user IDs, usernames etc) and then they all start acting on their own with your AI code. That kind of testing will generally work with a few good computers that can handle the load of a bunch of instances running at once. Saves you from opening 10 instances of swfs too. If you don't have nonscaling on then you can squish the app size down a bit. Then you watch the server load and maybe have one dedicated PC that is running one instance of the app to see how it handles the load of 100 users or so.
Of course, the very best is to get real humans to jump in on the app. There's nothing like having people come in and double click stuff and do things out of order (at least in your head) or slightly later or earlier than you expect them too. That's when the holes in your app can show up and perhaps begin to place odd loads on your script and the server.
Just in time for the weekend to play :)
Go get it here: http://www.adobe.com/go/tryflashmediaserver
There's lots to post about this release but oddly enough the one item that really struck me was how snappy the new admin console felt. As if it was rebuilt just a bit to be more efficient or perform better.. could be just me maybe.
I'll post more in the near future on new features and how to use them.
Don't forget to check out the new video tutorial site I've got running for FMS, FMSGuru.com. Stuff on FMS3 will be going up pretty soon.