February 13, 2007

Flash Lite 3; mobile phone video

Filed under: Flash — Steve @ 7:50 PM

Flash Lite 3 will support the same video formats supported by Adobe Flash Player and will directly support video streams delivered by the Adobe Flash Media Server, allowing users to view a broad spectrum of Flash Player compatible content. Videos can be viewed in different forms within the Flash environment, including downloadable video clips, streaming videos, applications with user interfaces based on Flash or personalized content such as wallpapers or screensavers.

Cool; combine that with the announcement by On2 this week that they will offer a server-side FLV to 3GPP engine in ‘07, and you could arguably no longer be concerned about the suitability of FLV for vodcasting; there are more people with mobiles than MP4/h.264 players out there. Flash Lite 2 is already close to Flash 7 in terms of functionality (the XML parsing would be especially useful), and the list of compatible devices is growing daily.

Now all I need is the time to properly get to grips with this stuff, including Flex. :-(

February 2, 2007

Multiple video feeds in Flash

Filed under: Uncategorized — Steve @ 9:25 AM

I now have a working application that shows and streams multiple simultaneous camera feeds into a single Flash/FMS instance. Caveats; client CPU load goes through the roof when switching in the second source, and it takes a looooong time for the player to rescan and access additional sources – don’t know why. I also tried using VHScreenCapture as a source, and that works too, allowing two camera feeds and desktop capture at the same time. So, if we can get over the CPU load problem (possibly by tweaking the camera settings) we could conceivably create something like the interface envisaged for the Theatre Studies project, with mixing and controls. I’d prefer to do this in Flex though; some clever people have it working already and it looks very nice indeed.

February 1, 2007

Adobe Apollo demonstration

Filed under: Uncategorized — Steve @ 1:05 PM

Writing about web page http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2840522561992638726&hl=en

Interesting examples of the kind of applications Apollo will be able to create;

It’ll be interesting to watch the fight between this, XULRunner and WPF/E now that Vista is out there.