In preparation for my session at Streaming Media Europe in a couple of weeks I had a play with the IP multicast feature in Flash today. Tom Krcha posted an excellent example on his blog a few months ago which demos this feature very well.
It's worth pointing out that this code works in a LAN setup, not over the public internet. This also means that Cirrus (aka Stratus) is not required for the P2P introduction - Flash Player can handle this itself on a multicast enabled LAN. Therefore you can try this using the devices on your local network, but not with your friends elsewhere on the net.

I wanted to try Tom's example on my iPad and Nexus One. The phone was easy since it can run Flash Player 10.1 and Tom's example app worked fine there. But what about the iPad?
Since I have got an Apple iOS developer account I am able to use the iPhone packaging feature in Flash CS5 to build iPhone and iPad applications. All I needed to do was to port Tom's Flex example to Flash as using the Flex framework on a device is not the best thing to do - at least not until themobile-optimised Hero SDK ships.

This blog post is therefore just a record to say: it worked and it worked well. Porting took only half an hour, and I then spent another half hour fine tuning a few bits and pieces, nothing major. The photo shows the app running on my Windows 7 netbook, the Nexus One and the iPad. I also had it running on my iMac and in the Flash IDE.

Say what you want about Flash on devices, there's something very cool about getting your code to run so easily in so many places. And remember this app now not only spans devices but also platforms and even runtimes since the iPad app is practically AIR based.

You can download my Flash app including sources here, but note that you need an iOS developer account to compile and install it on an iDevice.


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Posted on October 4, 2010 at 1:46 PM. 4510 views. Print